After a general introduction to Armenian folk songs, the workshop
participants initiated into Armenian folk dance-songs. They
learned about how dance-songs were created, how they were danced to, how they were transmitted, and how they traveled through time and space, with a special emphasis on the power of the circle as a collective entity.
Workshop participants sang and danced together to three dance-songs.

This workshop was organized and sponsored by the HASOM Armenian Music Program, presented by Tzovinar Artzrouni in Natalie Kamajian's Dance 12 class.

In 1924, the crown prince and future emperor of Ethiopia, Ras Täfäri, on a visit to Jerusalem, invited forty Armenian orphans who had survived the genocide of 1915-1916 to form his empire's royal brass band. The Armenian conductor of this brass band would go on to compose the first official anthem of the Ethiopian state. Drawing on this highly symbolic event, Boris Adjemian explores the role of collective memory in the making of an Armenian diaspora community in Ethiopia during the colonial era, as the country was in the process of becoming a nation-state. His book investigates the agency of Armenian immigrants and their descendants, as they played with and undermined assigned identities, forging a place in society between "Ethiopian" and "foreign."

This lecture was co-organized by the UCLA HASOM Armenian Music Program and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, and co-sponsored by the Promise Armenian Institute.

The name of Aram Andonian, a former journalist and author deported in 1915, is often cited in the historiography for the documents he published in 1920 in the aim of proving the intent of the Ottoman rulers to annihilate the Armenians during World War I.
However, historians have shown little interest to Andonian's literary oeuvre and his book Ayn sew orerun... ("In those dark days..."), a collection of short stories based on his own experience as a deportee in Meskene camp (Syria), written on the spot, and published in 1919. In this lecture, I propose to attempt to overcome this division between literature and history through a comparative reading of literary and documentary texts written by Aram Andonian about the camp of Meskene, and to answer the following question: is a historical reading of Ayn sew orerun... possible? And if so, what contribution would it make to our knowledge and to the historiography of the genocide?

This lecture was co-organized by the UCLA HASOM Armenian Music Program and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, and co-sponsored by the Promise Armenian Institute.