By following the life of the famous Mkrtich Khrimian (1820-1907), this talk will focus on the expansion and transformation of education in Van. It will point to why and how education was becoming increasingly available for the larger population beyond the monasteries, which had traditionally been the loci of education. Special attention will be paid to the global, imperial and local communal processes to explain what propelled the expansion of education and what inhibited the opening of new schools. Attending to such themes, this talk aims to challenge the understanding of the development of education in the Ottoman Armenian context as a top-down and West to East (i.e., Constantinople to the provinces) process.
Dr Dzovinar Derderian is an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the History Department at the University of California in Berkeley, where she also directs the Armenian Studies Program. She completed her doctoral degree in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2019. She has previously taught at the American University of Armenia and at the University of California, Irvine. She is a social and cultural historian focusing on nineteenth-century Armenians in the Ottoman and Russian empires. Her interest lies in peoples at the margins of empires, and their roles in processes of modernization.