Lecture 'Studying the Life and Work of Yekaterine Bahaturian (1870-1944), an Armenian Writer from Artsakh'
- For whom
- Employees , Private individuals , Students
- When
- 06-06-2024 from 14:00 to 15:00
- Where
- Room 3.30 (Camelot), Blandijnberg 2, 9000 Gent
- Language
- English
- Organizer
- Eureast Platform
- Contact
- eureast@ugent.be
The talk will focus on the ongoing research project that aims to question the masculinist representation of early-twentieth-century Armenian history and literature. At the same time, it seeks to de-Sovietise the perceptions of what counts as a literary contribution worth cataloguing as such. The talk thus aims to start a dialogue on research experiences and what it means to study forgotten female writers in post-Soviet archives.
Dr. Hayarpi Papikyan (American University of Armenia, Eureast Platform Visiting Fellow)
This talk is about a five-month-long journey into the post-Soviet archives to study the life and work of Yekaterine Bahaturian (1870-1944). Bahaturian was raised in Shushi, then one of the provincial centres of the Russian colonial government in the Caucasus, and lived in Baku (now the capital of Azerbaijan) and Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia). She wrote in Armenian and saw herself as a legitimate female writer alongside Armenian male writers. Her life and career were marked by drastic political and social changes in the three countries of the South Caucasus. We know how male writers and historians experienced these great tragedies, as their stories and narratives dominate Armenian history and literature of the period. But how did Bahaturian position herself and her literary work in the context of the social revolutions and wars that shaped the course of the twentieth century? Bahaturian wrote fifty-two plays, over fifty works of prose and numerous contributions to the periodical press, yet her name is never mentioned in studies of twentieth-century Armenian literature. Even her archival collection at the Yerevan Charents Museum of Literature and Art is catalogued in the theatre section, not the literature section, where she is a barely known woman who wrote plays.
Hayarpi Papikyan specialises in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Armenian studies, history and sociology of schooling and institutionalised education, and women’s history. She holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Education from the Université Paris V – Sorbonne Cité (2018). Since 2019, she has been teaching in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia, focusing primarily on the courses Methods of political inquiry, Qualitative research methods, Political sociology and Introduction to sociology.