Rethinking Armenian Studies

One of the great privileges of teaching at a university is the opportunity to work with students in the midst of their intellectual formation. In my courses, I ask students to write regularly, to trace how their thinking evolves over the course of the semester. These reflections are often striking in their depth and honesty, offering rare insight into how perspectives shift when students are invited not only to learn, but to question and reframe what they think they know. I find myself wanting to share these transformations as they unfold.

The Colloquium in Armenian Studies course at USC is devoted to rethinking Armenian Studies as a field. Students are asked to examine how knowledge itself is created and carried forward through an academic discipline, using Armenian Studies as both subject and lens. By tracing the birth, evolution, and future of the field, they begin to see how disciplines come into being, the forces that define them, and the ways they, in turn, shape individuals, communities, and the broader production of knowledge. The reflection below offers one such moment—an encounter with Armenian Studies from the perspective of a student who experienced it firsthand.

Courses like these are part of a broader effort to bring Armenian Studies into the undergraduate classroom in new and expansive ways, including offerings such as The Armenian Heritage: History, Arts, and Culture (MDA 330) available next Fall.

Dr. Shushan Karapetian

By Lilit Berikyan, USC Class of 2026

My final semester at USC left me with enough freedom to enroll in the class I had wanted to take for three years. It was the first time I would sit in a classroom devoted entirely to Armenia.

I entered Armenian Studies expecting to find progress. I imagined a collective narrative moving forward neatly through time, something I could reasonably call advancement.

Instead, I encountered spirals.

In Dr. Shushan Karapetian’s Colloquium in Armenian Studies, the course revolved around a deceptively simple question: What is Armenian Studies?

The question was posed not to be answered directly, but to be tested. Each discussion forced me to confront my own assumptions about Armenian culture and history. The spirals began to make sense when I stopped searching for a straight line of continuity and instead began tracing my own movement within them.

The Armenian diaspora is often narrated backward from catastrophe, framed primarily as an outcome of genocide. But throughout the course, we learned that Armenian life across distance long predates it. What later registered as rupture had once functioned as mobility. The repeated loss of land had so completely intensified our attachment to place that collectively, we forgot: Armenianness had always traveled. It had always flourished in motion and settlement, each giving life to the other.

Dr. K’s framing of lessons urged me to reconsider what it meant for Armenianness to move across space and time. Even the name of our country exists in dual form: Hayastan holds the memory of home, while Armenia carries the trace of movement into other tongues. And duality lives within the language itself. “Two mother tongues” — Eastern and Western — shaped across distance, by mountains, and by people who carried home with them wherever they went. Armenian life has been perpetually dispersed across different geographic, political, and economic spheres, making adaptation in motion a structural aspect of Armenian life, not merely a response to loss.

What persists is not rootedness fixed in place, but orientation. Whether one begins in the motherland or beyond its borders, Armenianness coheres around an act of return — not only to the land, but to the self.

While studying Armenian history, certain patterns surfaced and resurfaced across centuries and geographies. Armenians in early modern India were performing the same patterns of survival and belonging as Armenians in modern Los Angeles: building community across distance, maintaining and adapting language, and creating institutions that carry continuity beyond the boundaries of the motherland.

I quickly realized Armenian Studies had less to do with Armenian history and far more to do with the Armenian story. I understood deeply why Dr. K valued guest speakers over textbooks. Lived history carries something no archive can preserve.

To be Armenian is to inherit a long habit of proof — of survival, of productivity, of worthiness — proof in the eyes of others. That habit has sustained communities, built long-lasting institutions, and engraved us into histories that might otherwise have erased us.

But it has also imposed limits, narrowing identity into something defensive, constantly measured and justified, against molds and expectations, both external and internal. Dr. K’s class revealed and reiterated that continuity does not come from imitation.

True continuity is self-definition, the ability to allow Armenianness to expand through individual authenticity rather than contract under the weight of traditions and expectation. To live as an Armenian today is to follow a path that may not resemble those that came before — to work toward ideas that exist first in your mind, to act and create in ways that others may not yet understand, and to trust that presence itself, rather than proof alone, carries your identity forward.

For a people who have endured so much systemic erasure yet persisted despite it all, the most essential act of continuity is self-acceptance.

Interested in exploring Armenian Studies at USC? MDA 330: The Armenian Heritage: History, Arts, and Culture is available next Fall.