UCLA campus to host conference on Armenian Oral History Collections in North America

PanARMENIAN.Net - A unique conference on the Armenian Oral History Collections in North America, their uses for research and evidence, the media, the visual arts, and the performing arts, will take place on the UCLA campus, Humanities Building 51A, on April 2.

The conference, titled “Armenian Oral History Collections: Development, Uses, Potential,” has been organized by the UCLA AEF Chair in Modern Armenian History and the Oral History Research Center (John B. Jackson Faculty Curator Grant), with support from the Near Eastern Center, Bob and Nora Movel Fund, and the Souren and Verkin Papazian Fund, Asbarez reports.

Holders of Armenian Oral History Collections in Canada, Mexico, and the USA will gather to consider the potentials of the collections, their preservation and means of access. The public conference on April 2 will be preceded a day earlier with the participants being given a private tour of the extensive Holocaust oral history archive maintained by the Shoah Institute Foundation at the University of Southern California. Deliberations will then continue in the UCLA Oral History Research Center to consider critical issues relating to the maintenance, archiving, and possible sharing of the Armenian Genocide Oral History collections around the world.

UCLA Professor Richard Hovannisian said: “After organizing seventeen conferences in the series ‘Historic Armenian Cities and Provinces,’ as well as four conferences on the Armenian Genocide just in the past fifteen years at UCLA, I am gratified that this gathering will highlight the importance of Armenian oral history for the fields of anthropology, sociology, history, political science, economics, linguistics, music and arts, humanities, immigration and Diaspora studies, women’s studies, and comparative genocide studies. It is critical that we consider how best to preserve and utilize these precious first-person audio, video, and film testimonies of the last generation of Armenians to have been born in their native lands of Western Armenia, Cilicia, and Asia Minor and even in the European areas of the former Ottoman Empire.”