The Board of Directors of the Zoryan Institute unanimously appointed Professor Bedross Der Matossian as Director of Genocide Research, succeeding the late Professor Vahakn N. Dadrian, who led the Institute’s Genocide Research Program for more than a decade and left an enduring scholarly legacy.
Born and raised in the Old City of Jerusalem, Bedross Der Matossian is Professor of Modern Middle East History and the Hymen Rosenberg Professor in Judaic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2008 and has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Chicago. In 2026, he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his pioneering research on mass violence.
An internationally recognized scholar of the Armenian Genocide, the late Ottoman Empire, and modern Middle Eastern history, Professor Der Matossian is the author of several acclaimed books, including Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire and The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century. He is also the editor of Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century and Shattered Truths: Denial of Genocide in the Digital Age, and the co-editor, with Edita Gzoyan, of The Concentration Camps of the Armenian Genocide.
Upon his appointment, Professor Der Matossian stated:
