Aysenur Korkmaz MA

PhD candidate

Area(s) of interest: Memory Studies, Migration History & Diaspora, Transnational History, War & Conflict

Cohort/Start PhD: 2016-2017

Local and diasporic family memories of the Armenian genocide: a transnational ethnography

University of Amsterdam
Promotor(es): Prof. dr. Joep Leerssen, Dr Michiel Leezenberg
Aanstelling: vanaf december 2016

My PhD project is on the connected family memories of the Armenian Genocide in which survivors lost contact with their families and were scattered into various countries across the globe. In the aftermath of the genocide, some families found opportunities to contact or reunite with their relatives through the efforts of later generations. In this PhD project, I am interested in how survivors reconstituted their family lives with different ethno-religious identities across borders in the post-genocide era. Through the stories of four survivor families from Istanbul, Diyarbakır, Yerevan, and Amsterdam, I examine the Armenian Genocide remembrance in three levels: the micro-level to look at individual memories and identifications of survivors, b) the meso-level to examine the relationship between collective memories marked by memory regimes in Turkey, Armenia and Armenian diasporas and narratives of survivor families, c) the macro-level to analyze the interfamilial networks of families and approach them from a transnational memory approach. Through this multi-scalar analysis, I offer to study the Armenian Genocide remembrances comparatively, rather than interrogating them only within the boundaries of nation states and diasporas. Focusing on the four family histories of the Armenian Genocide, I suggest to treat the mnemonic encounters of genocide survivors as connected across the national borders, cultures and languages.