Working with Students
Armenian Forum Editors Ara Sarafian and
Vincent Lima Visit Southern California Campuses
Los Angeles, Calif. (12 May 1999)—Every Tuesday afternoon, Professor Hermine Mahseredjian’s Armenian civilization class at the California State University, Northridge, hears from a different scholar. On Tuesday, 20 April, the students were given a special treat. The guests were historians Ara Sarafian, from England, and Vincent Lima, from Princeton, N. J. The topic was "new approaches to studying the Armenian Genocide."
Hovig Manucharyan went back to school to hear the visiting scholars. "It was very intellectually intense," he recalled. "One of the most memorable meetings I’ve had."
Many of the students had heard of the visiting scholars through their publications and were eager to meet them in person. Lima and Sarafian are the editors of Armenian Forum, the quarterly journal of contemporary affairs. Sarafian, an archival historian who specializes in the late Ottoman period, is general editor of Gomidas Institute Books--publisher, most recently, of "Turkish Atrocities": Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–1917, compiled by James L. Barton.
In the days following the class at CSUN, Sarafian and Lima spoke at various other campuses: the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), the AGBU Manoogian-Demirdjian School in Canoga Park, California. Abril Bookstore in Glendale hosted an "authors’ evening," featuring Sarafian and Lima. They also appeared at Abril Bookstore’s booth at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA.
For many students, the visit of Lima and Sarafian was as memorable for the time they spent with students before and after their main events as it was for their formal presentations. Pavel Ekmekchyan, a UCLA senior about to enter UCLA Law School, was struck by the unassuming attitude of the visitors: "It is astonishing that young scholars such as they are can be so knowledgeable in their respective fields.... What seems to make them even more amazing is that in a more intimate environment they become a part of the group…. They joke, laugh, listen, explain, and understand with the students. You would never see anything even remotely resembling snobbishness."
Students said the visit was special because Sarafian and Lima spoke openly about their work and tried to demystify scholarship. Sarafian, for example, mentioned that he was going to stop in Laramie, Wyoming, to take a look at an archive there. He discussed how, going through the Ottoman archives in Turkey, he came across documents whose significance was not obvious to the censors, but was paramount in view of his readings and findings elsewhere.
This frank discussion gave students the sense that they could get involved and do this sort of thing as well. Sandy Kassabian, a freshman at USC, was "very interested to learn that [Armenian studies] was not something they were born wanting to do. It developed in them in their late teens and early twenties."
Ani Chavdarian, a senior in engineering at UCLA, was truly inspired: "They instilled in me a spark to continue working with the Armenian community once I leave UCLA."
Lima noted that possibilities for intellectual involvement are not limited to historical scholarship. He told Anahid Keshishian Aramouni’s Armenian language class at UCLA, "At most, I suppose, one of you here will pursue a graduate degree in Armenian history or literature. Armenian studies is much broader than that, however. Take, for example, Sosi Biricik. She is a partner in a big law firm. She spent four years going to Armenia and helping develop the energy laws there. We asked her to write an analysis of Armenia’s energy law. It appears in the forthcoming issue of Armenian Forum. Under an expanded definition of Armenian studies, all of us are potential contributors to the intellectual vitality of Armenian communities. We can learn a lot from each other for the common good."
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