Hrag Papazian
Biography
Hrag Papazian is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on subjectivities, meanings, and politics in post-genocide and post-conflict societies. His ethnographic research among Armenians in Turkey explores the construction, lived experience, and contestation of Armenianness across diverse trajectories, including Christian Armenians, Muslim and Alevi Armenians, and migrants from Armenia. He has also conducted research in Armenia, focusing on how Turkey and Turks are imagined in Armenian society and politics, particularly in the shadow of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
Before joining USC, he was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Armenia. He has served as a Kazan Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies at California State University, Fresno, and held the Promise Armenian Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship in UCLA’s Department of Anthropology, as well as a Visiting Scholarship with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme at the University of Cambridge. He earned a DPhil in Anthropology and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
My research is centrally concerned with entanglements between subjectivities and politics, particularly in contexts informed by long-term violence and suffering. 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
Political anthropology, (post)genocide, violence, suffering, conflict, subjectivity, memory, classification, meanings, boundaries, belonging, ethnicity, racialization, religion, conversion, citizenship, migration, diasporicity, Turkey, Armenia
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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. (2017). “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
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- 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