The Armenian Woman & the Making of Iranian Modernity

COMMUNITY LECTURE AND BOOK SIGNING

Dr. Houri Berberian is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the the author of Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions of the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (2019).

Dr. Talinn Grigor is a Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture (2021).

With this book, Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran's central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.

Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism, and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of "the archive" and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran's history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.

“A richly documented, vigorously narrated account of the processes through which Armenian women attained agency and played a role in shaping modernity, both in Iran and along the trans-imperial pathways of the Armenian diaspora, engaging communities in Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and the British Empire.”

—Khachig Tölölyan, Wesleyan University

"This beautifully conceived and groundbreaking history of modern Armenian women fills a gaping lacuna in studies of Armenians in Iran and the Middle East. Working with a vast array of sources, the authors give texture to the multifaceted experiences of Armenian women and a critical re-reading of portrayals of Armenians."

—Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, University of Pennsylvania

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