Conferences

On November 2nd, 2024 more than 1,000 people gathered at USC’s Bovard Auditorium for a groundbreaking symposium that featured a vibrant mix of academic panel discussions, multimedia artistic presentations, and live performances that highlighted the Armenian experience in the global conversation on dispossession and cultural erasure. The program approached the topic of displacement through diverse angles and perspectives, including those of people from Artsakh, Armenian Studies experts, and USC scholars from across disciplines.

A centennial conference, which brought together scholars and film makers from around the world to examine the myriad border crossings and hybridities that characterize Parajanov’s life and oeuvre.

Twenty-five years after the Soviet collapse, citizens of Armenia, as well as observers and scholars are asking “Now What?” In an effort to better understand the past quarter century and to look for ways forward, the USC Institute of Armenian Studies held a two-part two-city conference held in Los Angeles and Yerevan.

This was not the Armenia Spring, nor was it a Color Revolution.
So what was it? After two weeks of peaceful protests that led to the resignation of the prime minister and a re-start of Armenia’s democratic development, Armenia’s future is unclear.
Hope is mixed with trepidation, political novices and experts are busy reading the Constitution, to try to understand what is and is not possible. Old political powers are not letting go, even as new political actors are eager to take charge. The region and the world are watching.

Scholars and experts talk about the challenges of electoral politics everywhere, and especially in Armenia. Five political scientists, five artists, and three practitioners from six locations spoke about the realities and challenges of democratization.

The USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies co-sponsored the 9th International Conference on Genocide by the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) and the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research(CAGR), which took place from June 23 to June 26, 2024 at USC. The biennial convention entitled “Genocide and Survivor Communities: Agency, Resistance, Recognition” featured scholarship by Armenian Scholars, and an excursion of Armenian Los Angeles.

Organized by the UCLA Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, the two-day conference featured an international group of scholars, who explored the Indo-Armenian saga in South Asia from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries through themes such as the connected economic, literary, legal, and political histories of Armenians and Indians.

The two-day international conference aimed to reflect on the contemporary reshapings of the Armenian diaspora(s), revealing their diversity and the new dynamics at work. The proceedings of the conference will be published in Études arméniennes contemporaines, the bilingual journal of the AGBU Nubar Library.