Join us for a special Celebration Brunch honoring the 65th Anniversary of St. Nersess Armenian Seminary.

Saturday, September 26, 2026
10:30am–1:00pm
Claremont Resort & Spa
41 Tunnel Road, Berkeley

We’re honored to welcome His Eminence Archbishop Hovnan Derderian, along with Rev. Fr. Mardiros Chevian, Dean of St. Nersess, and other clergy and friends of the Seminary.

We hope you can join us as we celebrate this wonderful milestone together!

Reservations & Sponsorships: stnersess.edu/western-diocese/
Suggested individual donation: $100 

For additional information, please contact Valina Agbabian at vagbabian@yahoo.com.

This talk is based on a collaborative digital mapping project that critically examines the interplay of erasure, power, and empire in Soviet-era ethnographic maps of the Caucasus. Using the 1959 census and ensuing maps as an example, Goff will discuss why these maps should be analyzed as argumentative sites rather than as illustrations of statistical data. How are maps representations of the concerns and subjectivities of Soviet mapmakers and how do the aesthetic qualities of maps complicate the historical narratives that we can tell?

Speaker’s Bio:

Krista Goff is an associate professor of history at the University of Miami and co-editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. She is the award-winning author of Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus and co-editor of Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands. Goff is currently working on a new manuscript about the experience of World War Two in the Caucasus and the long life of war-related deportations, forced resettlements, and prosecutions.

4 p.m.
Dwinelle 3335 UC Berkeley

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/331319-lines-of-control-the-hidden-politics-of-soviet

voskidancecollective@gmail.com

In the Shadow of Genocide: Female Perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide

Oct 8 5 p.m.
Sproul Rooms, International House

Abstract

Women are often imagined as victims of war and genocide rather than participants in violence. Yet the genocides of the twentieth century challenged this assumption, revealing that women could also play important roles in persecution and mass killing.

This talk explores a largely overlooked aspect of the Armenian Genocide: the involvement of Turkish women in violence against Armenians. Drawing on Armenian survivors’ testimonies and memoirs, alongside other historical sources, it examines the many ways women participated—from spreading hatred and encouraging violence to looting, abduction, and, in some cases, direct killing. The evidence also points to forms of organized and institutional involvement that deserve further investigation.

By bringing women perpetrators into the story, this talk offers a more complete understanding of how genocide is carried out. It also invites us to rethink common assumptions about gender, violence, and responsibility during one of the twentieth century’s defining atrocities.

Speaker’s Bio

Dr. Edita Gzoyan is a lecturer at the American University of Armenia and Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies. She holds a PhD in International Relations from Yerevan State University and an LL.M. from the American University of Armenia. Her research focuses on the history and legal dimensions of the Armenian Genocide, humanitarian responses and refugee assistance, gender-based violence, forced child transfer, and the post-genocide recovery of Armenian women and children.

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/327789-in-the-shadow-of-genocide-female-perpetrators-of-the-

The Other Minds Festival turns 30! On Thursday–Sunday, October 8–11, 2026, our annual showcase for composers will be held at the Brava Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The Festival opens with Joseph Bohigian’sI Am He Whose Life and Soul Are Torment, an evening-length multimedia work about the life of Armenian film director Sergei Parajanov performed by Khatchadour Khatchadourian and Ensemble Decipher. Tara Baghdassarian, art director; Karo Yagjian, costume designer.

On Night 2, the Swiss-born, New York-based Sylvie Courvoisier combines European chamber music and American avant-jazz in a performance for solo piano. Mahsa Vahdat performs original song settings of Persian poetry, accompanied by setar player Atabak Elyasi. Night 2 ends with string quartet music by Juri Seo performed by Friction Quartet.

Night 3 opens with Kristin Norderval and Elizabeth Gaver, who will present a program for voice, live electronics, Hardanger fiddle, and rebec that reflects on historical and contemporary Norwegian-American exchange. Foreign/Domestic – Zachary James Watkins and John Diaz presents a duo of guitar/electronics and drums. The evening ends with an enlivening set of “Blacktronika” from one of the world’s experts: King Britt on live electronics.

At the final concert of OM 30, Charlemagne Palestine, sovereign of embodied minimalism, graces us with a performance for solo piano.

About Other Minds:

Founded in 1993, Other Minds is a leading proponent for new and experimental music in all its forms, bringing together artists and audiences of diverse traditions, generations, and cultural backgrounds. By fostering cross- cultural exchange and creative dialogue, and by encouraging exploration of areas in new music seldom touched upon by mainstream music institutions, OM is committed to expanding and reshaping the definition of what constitutes “serious music.” From festival concerts, weekly radio broadcasts, and the commissioning of new works, to producing and releasing CDs, to archival preservation of thousands of concerts and composer interviews (which OM distributes free on the internet), OM has become one of the world’s major conservators of new music’s ecology.

5 p.m.
340 Stephens Hall, 40, Berkeley, CA 94720 

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. A literary scholar with an aesthete’s temperament, he did not experience his political awakening until the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, which transformed his thinking and led him to forge ties with political groups and like-minded scholars. Said’s subsequent writings, which cast light on the interplay between cultural representation and the exercise of Western political power, caused a seismic shift in scholarly circles and beyond. In this intimate intellectual biography, by a close friend and confidant, Nubar Hovsepian offers fascinating insight into the evolution of Said’s political thought.

Through analysis of Said’s seminal works and the debates surrounding them, Edward Said: The Politics of an Oppositional Intellectual traces the influence of Foucault on Said, and how Said eventually diverged from this influence to arrive at a more pronounced understanding of agency, resistance, and liberation. He consequently affiliated more closely with Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, and more contemporaneously, with his friends the late Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod.

Said held that it is the intellectual’s responsibility to expose lies and deceptions of the holders of power. A passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause, his solidarity did not prevent him from launching a sustained critique of the Palestinian leadership. Hovsepian charts both Said’s engagement with the Palestinian national movement and his exchanges with a host of intellectuals over Palestine, arguing that Said’s interventions have succeeded in changing the parameters of the discourse in the humanities, and among younger Jews searching for political affiliation.

Drawing on his diaries, in which he recorded his meetings with Said, as well as access to some of Said’s private letters, Hovsepian illuminates, in rich detail, the trajectory of Said’s political thinking and the depth and breadth of his engagement with peers and critics over issues that continue to resonate to this day.

Speaker: Nubar Hovsepian, Associate Professor Emeritus, Chapman UniversityAdmission Information:

Please register for this public book talk via the following link: https://forms.gle/12T27NEX2BpB62A29

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/317583-rescheduled-event-edward-said-the-politics-of-an-oppo