Nanor Kebranian Stepien
Nanor Kebranian Stepien
Biography
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2020 – 2021)
Postdoctoral Researcher in Theory, History, and Human Rights - Queen Mary University of London School of Law (2016 - 2019)
Co-founder and Programme Director – Queen Mary Centre for Law, Democracy and Society (2016 – 2019)
Assistant Professor – Columbia University Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (2008 – 2016)
Project
During her year at the Center, Nanor Kebranian Stepien will be completing three related projects with project funding from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. The first is the completion of her monograph Contested Communities: Writing Ottoman Subjects in an Age of Genocide. As a multidisciplinary work of historico-politico-literary scholarship, this study examines representations of Ottoman-Armenian subjecthood by liberal Armenian leaders of social, cultural, and political reform between 1860 and 1945. It provides the first in-depth study of late Ottoman non-Muslim – specifically, Armenian – subjectivities as they were shaped on the one hand, by the state’s system of hierarchically implemented ethno-religious communalization, and, on the other, by the social experience of multi-ethnic/confessional coexistence. Compared to the parallel field of Postcolonial Studies, few Ottomanists have broached this phenomenon due to the paucity of archives, the hegemony of nationalist methodologies, and a disciplinary unwillingness to move beyond historiography. The book breaches these limits and shows – for the first time both in Ottoman/Turkish and Armenian history and criticism – how Armenians embraced, problematized, and/or subverted their imperialized selves.
Alongside this work, the project will also culminate in two edited collections of Armenian writings and translations by the Ottoman-Armenian authors, Zabel Yessayan and Rupen Zartarian, which will include critical introductions by Kebranian. These collections will reveal hitherto unknown or unrecognized texts that revise and problematize existing social, cultural, and literary histories of Ottoman communal coexistence.
Kebranian has also received funding from the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund to complete a translation of the influential and previously untranslated memoir - Twelve Years Away from Constantinople (1896 - 1909) - by the Ottoman-Armenian intellectual and activist, Yervant Odian. That translation - along with an in-depth introduction by Kebranian - is expected to appear in 2024 with the press of the Gomidas Institute (London).