Nanor Kebranian Stepien

Nanor Kebranian Stepien

Nanor Kebranian is a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies, where she will be completing three related projects with 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. The book breaches existing historiographic 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. Before joining the Center, Kebranian received a year-long project grant to edit and translate the well-received collection, Zabel Yessayan on the Threshold: Key Texts on Armenians and Turks as Ottoman Subjects (Gomidas Institute, 2023). In 2020-2021, she was a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Program at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). Prior to this appointment, she was Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Theory, History, and Human Rights in the HERA-funded project for Memory Laws in European and Comparative Perspective in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London (2016-2019). She also served as Assistant Professor in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (2008-2016), while completing her doctorate at the University of Oxford (2010) with generous competitive fellowships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Oxford's Clarendon Fund. Her research interests and publications cover the legal, political, and cultural effects of genocide; diasporic identities and discourses; and subaltern histories of the late Ottoman Empire.