Public Events

Music in Time of War Debussy / Komitas Album release concert

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Kirill Gerstein, piano

Followed by a discussion featuring:

Kirill Gerstein

Annette Becker (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)

Khatchig Mouradian (Columbia University)

and moderated by Paul Boghossian (NYU)

Video from the event is available here.

Inquiries: gias.events@nyu.edu

Co-sponsored by The Armenian Center at Columbia University.

‘Facts Are Stubborn Things’: How Denial Turns Facts Into Opinions and Erodes Truth

April 24, 2023

The American civil rights leader Medgar Evers is credited with saying “You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea.” But the Ottoman Empire and subsequently the Republic of Turkey have tried, and in some ways succeeded, in having it both ways. First they killed the Armenians, and then they tried to kill the idea that they had killed the Armenians. Turkey’s protégé state Azerbaijan has emulated its “big brother,” expunging the region of Nakhichevan of all evidence of Armenian existence, threatening Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) with annihilation while eradicating evidence of Armenians’ presence in the region, and, in effect, denying the existence of Armenia as such.

While recognition by the U.S. Congress (2019) and President Biden (2021) of the Armenian Genocide are in themselves important and contribute to the never-ending pushback against genocide denial, they do not signal that efforts to deny the Armenian Genocide are in retreat. Turkey’s official denialist stance remains unchanged and efforts to push its narrative in academic, journalistic, and think tank circles are undiminished. Concurrently, Azerbaijan’s successful 2020 war against Armenia, carried out with crucial support from Turkey, has emboldened efforts to promote its own counterfactual agenda.

This presentation will focus on several efforts since 2019 to continue and expand the long-running project of Armenian Genocide denial and will also discuss how it dovetails with the efforts of Azerbaijan to rewrite history as a means to dictate Armenia’s future but also its past.

Speaker: Marc A. Mamigonian

Marc A. Mamigonian is the Director of Academic Affairs of the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), where he has worked since 1998. He is the co-author of the volume Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses (Oxford University Press, 2022; with John N. Turner and Sam Slote) and is the co-author of annotated editions of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Alma Classics, 2014; with John N. Turner) and Ulysses (Alma Classics, 2015, with John N. Turner and Sam Slote). He has served as the editor of the Journal of Armenian Studies and the volume The Armenians of New England (Armenian Heritage Press, 2004), and has published articles in Genocide Studies International, James Joyce Quarterly, Armenian Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, and elsewhere. His chapter “Weaponizing the First Amendment: Denial of the Armenian Genocide and the U.S. Courts” is forthcoming in Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century, Bedross Der Matossian, ed. (Univ. of Nebraska Press).

Discussant: Lerna Ekmekçioğlu

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu is an Associate Professor of History at MIT and the director of Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She is a historian of the early Turkish Republic with particular focus on minorities. Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in 2016. In 2006 she co-edited a volume in Turkish on the first five Armenian Ottoman/Turkish feminists. Currently she is collaborating with Dr. Melissa Bilal (UCLA) for a book and digital humanities project titled “Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Documentary Archive” (Stanford U. Press, 2024).

Coverage of the event in The Armenian Weekly is now available here:
Marc Mamigonian’s presentation at NYU addresses genocide denial and the erosion of truth

Antisymmetry and Comparative Syntax: Celebrating 25 years of Antisymmetry and 75 years of Richard S. Kayne

March 29-30, 2019

NYU is delighted to announce a workshop March 29th-30th, 2019 in celebration of the 25th anniversary of Richard S. Kayne’s seminal monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax and the 75th anniversary of his birth.

The workshop is free and open to all, although registration in advance is required.

Information on the workshop can be found here.

Registration is requested by March 2nd, 2019.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and the Global Institute for Advanced Study at NYU.

The Economics and Ethics of Immigration

October 13, 2018

A one-day conference bringing together philosophers and economists to explore the challenges and promises of immigration.

Organizers

K. Anthony Appiah, NYU Philosophy and Law

Jess Behabib, NYU Economics

Giovanni Peri, UC Davis Economics; Director, UC Davis Migration Research Cluster

Daniel Viehoff, NYU Philosophy

Inquiries: gias.events@nyu.edu

Videos from this event are available here.

The GIAS on Canonical Neural Computation announces a major public symposium: Canonical Computation in Brains and Machines, at NYU from March 16-18, 2018. Please visit the symposium web page for program and registration information.