Hrag Papazian

Tenure Track Appointments

• Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California, 2024 –

Research, Teaching, Practice, and Clinical Appointments

• Assistant Professor of Anthropology, American University of Armenia, 2023-2024

PostDoctoral Appointments

• Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA, Department of Anthropology, 2021-2022

Visiting and Temporary Appointments

• Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies, California State University, Fresno, Fall 2022
• Visiting Scholar, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Divinity , 07/2021 – 03/2022

Summary Statement of Research Interests

My research is centrally concerned with the relationships and entanglements between identities, subjectivities, and politics. I am interested in how meanings, attachments, and categories that people adopt for themselves or impose on others are enmeshed with, produced by, and in turn shape practices of power and politics at interpersonal, collective, and institutional levels. I explore these questions through an ethnographic focus on Armenians in Turkey and on Armenian-Turkish relations more broadly, in the shadow of the 1915-1923 genocide of Ottoman Armenians—a foundational event for both modern Turkey and contemporary Armenian subjectivity.

Research Keywords

subjectivity, identification, categorization, meanings, boundary-making, conflict, violence, suffering, memory, attachment, belonging, ethnicity, racialization, religion, citizenship, migration, diasporicity.

Book Chapters

• Papazian, H. (2023). Are Istanbul Armenians Diasporic? Unpacking the Famous Debate. Diaspora and ‘Stateless Power’: the Armenian Experience through the Transnational 20th Century pp. 232-249. Bloomsburry / I. B. Tauris.. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph-detail?docid=b-9780755648245&tocid=b-9780755648245-chapter11

Journal Article

• Papazian, H. (2024). War in Nagorno-Karabakh Shakes Up Armenian-Turkish Relations. Current History / UC Press. Vol. 123 (855), pp. 268-273. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2024.123.855.268
• Papazian, H. (2023) “Turkey and ‘Turks’ in Postwar Armenia: Anxieties, meanings, and politics after the 2020 Karabakh war”, Ethnopolitics, 23:3, 317–338. DOI. Vol. 10. 1080/17449057 2023:176587 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17449057.2023.2176587#abstract
• Papazian, H., and Öztürk, S. A. (2022). “Between Passports and Belongings: Armenian citizenship acquisition among Armenians of Turkey.”. Citizenship Studies. Vol. 27 (4), pp. 481-497. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2022.2151571
• Papazian, H. (2016). “Between Gezi Park and Kamp Armen: The intersectional activism of leftist Armenian youths in Istanbul.”. Turkish Studies. Vol. 18 (1), pp. 56-76. https://doi.org/10.1080/14683849.2016.1266616

Other

• Papazian, H., Khoodaverdyan, N. (2020). Armenians and Other Armenians in Turkey. Illustrating Anthropology. https://illustratinganthropologycom.wordpress.com/hrag-papazian/

• USC Endowed Chair, Turpanjian Early Career Chair in Contemporary Armenian Studies, 2024 –
• Honorable Mention, Society for Armenian Studies Dissertation Competition (2017-2020 dissertations), 2021
• Prof. David Parkin Prize in Ethnographic Materials (Dissertation Award), University of Oxford, School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography., 2020