“Use Consoling Words for our Butchered Nation”: Armenian Feminists’ Post-Genocide Expectations from their Turkish Counterparts

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is also affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Program. Together with Melissa Bilal, she is the co-editor of the 2006 book in Turkish titled A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862–1933). Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in 2016. Currently she is collaborating with Melissa Bilal for Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Digital Archive which focuses on the life and works of twelve pioneering women intellectuals from 1860s to 1960s.

Elyse Semerdjian is Professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern History at Whitman College and the President of the Syrian Studies Association. A specialist in the history of the Ottoman Empire and Syria, she authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) as well as several articles on gender, sexuality, non-Muslims, and law in the Ottoman Empire. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.  Her forthcoming book titled Remnants: Encrypted Bodies, Gender, and Memory of the Armenian Genocide examines embodiment and sexual atrocity during the Armenian Genocide.