https://creees.stanford.edu/events/drop-woman-reclaiming-unnamed

A Drop of Woman: Reclaiming the Unnamed

Date

Mon, Apr 13 2026, 12:30pm

Event Sponsor

Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies

Location

Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm. 123

After the Adana massacres, an orphaned Armenian woman arrives at Ellis Island and makes her way to Murray Hill. Shocked by the living conditions of her people, she writes a letter to a major newspaper—a single act that sets her on a journey from refugee to editor-in-chief. Through her story, the voices of other forgotten women writers and editors of lost Armenian periodicals weave in and out. a drop of woman: unnamed, unwritten is an experimental novel that asks who gets to be remembered—and attempts to resurrect those history left behind.

Please RSVP here.

Dr. Tamar Marie Boyadjian is an internationally recognized, award-winning author, editor, translator, and medievalist. She is the first US-born author to publish a book of poetry in Western Armenian and the first to pen a fantasy book in the same. Her extensive body of work explores medieval voices, the ethics of endangered language translation and preservation, the voices of women in Western Armenian literary history, and Armenian futurism. She has edited two volumes of contemporary Armenian literature in English, has translated many short stories and works of poetry, and has contributed to almost a dozen books of translation. Notable among these is her translation of Zabel Yesayan’s first novel, In the Waiting Room which is in consideration at Harvard University Press with a preface by Peter Balakian. From 2020 to 2024, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. She currently teaches Western Armenian language courses at Stanford University. Her third-year Armenian language course made history as the first college-level Armenian class to use translation as a pedagogical method—and together, they translated the prison memoir of Vartuhi Kalantar.

Myrna Douzjian is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, where she has developed the curricula for courses on Armenian language and culture over the past ten years. Douzjian is also the author of academic and periodical articles on post-Soviet drama, contemporary diaspora literature and film, and the politics of literary publication. Her current research examines twentieth-century Armenian literature in the context of its cross-cultural encounters.

Aurora’s Sunrise: Purchase Tickets

Thursday, Apr 16, 2026

4 PM (96 mins)
BAMPFA

Inna Sahakyan
Armenia, Germany, Lithuania, 2022

In Conversation

Dzovinar Derderian

Dzovinar Derderian is Executive Director of the Armenian Studies Program and Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley.

Myrna Douzjian

Myrna Douzjian teaches Armenian language and literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley and is working on a study of interrelations between various storytelling forms and media in contemporary Armenia and Russia.

FEATURING

Anzhelika Hakobyan, Arpi Petrossian, Shushan Abrahamyan, 

In 1915, at fourteen years of age, Aurora Mardiganian lost everything during the horror of the Armenian genocide. But with luck and extraordinary courage, she escaped to New York, where her story became a media sensation. Starring in Auction of Souls, one of the first Hollywood blockbusters, as herself in 1919, Aurora would become the face of the largest charity campaign in American history. With a blend of animation, archival imagery, and rediscovered footage from the previously lost silent epic, Armenian director Inna Sahakyan’s award-winning historical documentary reconstructs the life story of this hero, who died in 1994.

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/318513-staging-encounters-with-landscape-matter

Over the past decade, Aroussiak Gabrielian has developed a series of speculative design prototypes that interrogate the position of the human within an increasingly unstable planetary future. Working at the intersection of landscape architecture, media arts, and futures practice, her projects stage intimate encounters between human bodies and landscape matter – soil, plants, water, atmosphere – to unsettle extractive habits of perception and cultivate new modes of attention, reciprocity, and care.

Drawing inspiration from fragmentary traces of indigenous Armenian cosmologies that understood the natural world as a living field of relations – where mountains, springs, trees, winds, and soil were animated presences within a shared ecological and spiritual order – Gabrielian explores how design can function not only as a tool for shaping environments but as a medium for transforming relationships between human and more-than-human worlds through installations, rituals, and experimental spatial practices.

This lecture presents recent creative works, writings, and applied research, examining how speculative design and expanded media can reorient environmental imaginaries and open pathways toward more ethical and collaborative ways of living within planetary systems in flux.

Bio:

Aroussiak Gabrielian, Ph.D is a designer, scholar, media artist, and professional futurist whose work examines the evolving entanglements between environment, technology, and culture. As Founding Design Principal and Futures Consultant at FOREGROUND DESIGN AGENCY, she leads transdisciplinary design-research and foresight initiatives that rethink humanity’s relationship to planetary systems and prototype regenerative strategies for living – and dying – on a planet in flux.

Trained as an Architect, Landscape Architect, and Artist, Aroussiak holds dual master’s degrees (M.Arch + M.L.Arch, with honors) from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Media Arts + Practice from the University of Southern California, where she was an Annenberg Fellow. Her practice integrates speculative design, futures methodologies, and expanded media to engage the spatial, temporal, sensorial, and material dimensions of landscape – developing frameworks for social and ecological transformation.

Before founding FOREGROUND, Aroussiak was a Lead Designer at Snøhetta in New York City, contributing to major projects including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art expansion and the Guadalajara Museum of Environmental Science. She continues to consult as a futures practitioner and domain expert, with recent collaborations including Nike, Ford Motor Company, Google Research, and the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.

Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, including the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award, and the Emerging Designer Award from the Design Futures Initiative. Her projects and installations have been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Getty Center, SXSW (South by Southwest), Ars Electronica, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City, and Science Gallery Detroit.

Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, Affiliate Faculty in Media Arts + Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts, and Founding Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, a design-research incubator advancing climate innovation and imagination.

Saturday, 4/25/2026 
2:00 – 3:30

https://sfpl.org/events/2026/04/25/performance-raffi-garabedian-armenian-film

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Golden Gate Valley Meeting Room

Golden Gate Valley

Address

1801 Green Street
San Francisco, CA 94123

Commemorate Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, on the day after April 24, with a music performance by Raffi Garabedian. Following the music, we will show a short film about the history of the Armenian people, courtesy of the Armenian Film Foundation in Los Angeles. 

Raffi Garabedian is a tenor saxophonist and composer living in Oakland, California. A dedicated improvisationalist, Garabedian centers spontaneous composition as the foundation to explore new rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic cycles. Raffi was born and raised in Berkeley, California, and attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, from which he received a BFA in Jazz Performance. He has toured extensively—both at the helm of his own projects, and as a member of other groups—and has played and recorded with luminaries such as Jorge Rossy, Ben Street, Dayna Stephens, and Johnny Talbot. On Garabedian’s last album, The Crazy Dog (2024), he ventured into new compositional grounds, writing for voice as part of an octet. Garabedian sourced the project’s lyrics from his father and grandmother’s writings about their lives in Turkish Armenia and the family’s journey to the United States during the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Garabedian plays in several other projects around the Bay Area. In addition to his music practice, Garabedian is a seasoned educator, and is on the jazz saxophone faculty at Sonoma State University, as well as instructing the award-winning Berkeley High School Jazz program. He has taught regularly at the California Jazz Conservatory, the Stanford Jazz Workshop, and works with private students.

Connect:

Raffi Garabedian – Bandcamp 

https://creees.stanford.edu/events/poetry-traumatic-history-memory-thinking-about-armenian-genocide

Location

Encina Commons
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Rm. 123

How can a past historical event be transformed by literature that comes after? Pulitzer Prize winning poet Peter Balakian will discuss the impact of the Armenian Genocide on his work. He will explore the transmission of trauma across generations and how poetry’s resources can ingest the past. He will discuss how his ancestors have provided a grounding for his work including his great-great uncle, Krikoris Balakian (Bishop in the Armenian Church), who was one of the 250 cultural leaders arrested on April 25, 1915 at the onset of the Genocide, and his grandmother Nafina Shekerlemdjian, who was a Genocide survivor along with her two young daughters, enduring a harrowing death march into the Syrian desert.

Please RSVP here.

Peter Balakian is the author of 9 books of poems, 4 books of prose, 3 collaborative translations and several edited books. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and his new book of poems is New York Trilogy. His poems have appeared widely in the leading magazines and journals in English for decades. His prose books include Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture; Black Dog of Fate, a memoir—winner of the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir (a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His collaborative translation of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year.

Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Horanatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy and The Emily Clark Balch Prize from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio and his work has been translated into many languages and editions and most recently into Tamil in 2025. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English at Colgate University.

RSVP at this Link