Elyse Semerdjian is a social historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the empire’s Armenian subjects. She has authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) winner of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS) and the Institute for the Study of Genocide Raphael Lemkin best book prize awards.
Semerdjian received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. She served as Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago and was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship in 2016. In 2023-2024, she received a German Research Grant with the “Religion and Urbanity” Research Group at the University of Erfurt, Germany, to support new research projects on Aleppo. She has begun writing her long-planned third book, Etched in Ink and Stone: An Urban History of Aleppo’s Armenians, which tells two intertwined tales of survival in tandem: that of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, and its Armenian community. She also recently did an interview with the Society for Armernian Studies podcast: https://armenianstudies.podbean.com/e/sas-podcast-no-62-–-elyse-semerdjian/
Serving both the Strassler Center and the History Department at Clark University, Semerdjian teaches Armenian history, including the history of the Armenian Genocide, and a mix of courses on gender, the Middle East, and the Ottoman Empire.
Courses:
Hist 135: “The Armenian Genocide”
Hist 136: “Sex, Gender & Islam”
Hist 162: “The Modern Middle East”
Hist 230/330: “Genocide in Comparative Perspective”
Hist 242/342: “Harem Histories”
Hist 239: “Imagining Armenia: Nation and Diaspora”
1xx “Ottomania! History, Politics, and Memory of the Ottoman Empire”
2xx “Death/Afterlife”