Projects for Peace Alums Preserve Memory after War Displacements
Midd Stories, Middlebury University
Human rights lawyers and digital archivists Anoush Baghdassarian and Ani Schug visited Middlebury College this October, meeting with hundreds of students over four days, and bringing to campus a look at the Rerooted Archive. The archive is a digital repository holding the stories of the Armenian diaspora. The team started Rerooted almost decade ago as a project funded by the Middlebury-based youth peacebuilding program Projects for Peace.
The Rerooted Archive addresses the challenge of how war and displacement threaten to erase narratives, languages, and cultural threads that bind a country together. From survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire to the thousands displaced from Artsakh in 2023, the Rerooted Archive serves as a way to preserve the experiences and memories of those Armenians who have been forced to find new homes away from their homeland through spoken dialects, family photographs, and generational memories.
Baghdassarian and Schug described how their organization documents testimonies from displaced Armenian communities to advance both cultural preservation and international legal justice. The visit, celebrating Baghdassarian as the recipient of the 2026 Projects for Peace Alumni Award, was also an opportunity for the team to learn from Middlebury experts about ways to advanceRerooted’s work in meaningful and sustainable ways.
A College Project Launches a Lifelong Mission
In 2017, while Baghdassarian was an undergraduate at Claremont McKenna College and Schug at Pomona College, they applied for support from Projects for Peace, a global youth initiative open to students nationwide, headquartered at Middlebury’s Center for Community Engagement and now part of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. The pair used the $10,000 grant to travel to Armenia as thousands of Syrian-Armenians sought refuge from the Syrian civil war.
Over seven weeks, they recorded video and audio interviews documenting ancestral memories alongside pre-war life in Syria and the daily realities of starting over. That starter project, then called Restorative Memory, established the principle that would guide their future work. As Baghdassarian wrote in her project report: “Everyone has a story to tell and everyone has the power to move another person to feel something, and in effect, do something … there are no voiceless, only those whose voices must be shared.”
Baghdassarian and Schug meet with Rohatyn Center Fellows during their campus visit. This year the fellows are exploring the topic of global peace and were interested in hearing how work on Armenian communities speaks to this idea.
What began as an undergraduate initiative funded by the Middlebury-based program has evolved into the Rerooted Archive, a globally recognized repository housing hundreds of testimonies, dialect recordings, and legal briefs submitted directly to bodies like the United Nations and the International Criminal Court. The project’s sustained impact earned Baghdassarian the 2026 Projects for Peace Alumni Award.
During their visit, Baghdassarian and Schug participated in 26 hours of roundtables, classroom discussions, and informal gatherings, connecting with more than 220 students, faculty, and local community members. They presented in Professor Amit Prakash’s European Catastrophe course, spoke in Professor Ellie Nevins’s Linguistics Senior Seminar, joined a Center for Community Engagement lunch on endangered dialects alongside scholars of Spanish, Hakka, Mandarin, and Armenian, and offered career guidance to pre-law students on compiling international court briefs. They also met with the Rohatyn Fellows to discuss global peace efforts, hosted a walking tour with Middlebury’s Armenian students, and conferred with directors from the Henry Sheldon Museum and Town Hall Theater regarding local arts and community fundraising.
Memory Workers in the Library
In the lower-level reading room of Davis Family Library, Baghdassarian and Schug met with Rebekah Irwin, dean of the library; Chris Burns, director of Special Collections; and research librarians. The Special Collections team pulled historical volumes on Armenian history—ranging from cookbooks to religious texts—offering a physical counterpart to the digital collection the Rerooted team continues to expand.
During a roundtable discussion among the texts, librarians and archivists discussed digital curation strategies to help the Rerooted team widen public access for educators and researchers while maintaining secure preservation standards required by international legal tribunals.
“There’s been an interesting development in our field over the last 20 or 25 years, where you’ll often hear people talk about themselves as memory workers as much as archivists or librarians,” said Chris Burns. “We think a lot in our archives and special collections about the voices that are captured in the resources as well as the voices that aren’t captured, and how you get at those, and what’s missing in the archives, and how do you fill in those gaps.”
That focus on living memory carried into other learning spaces across campus. Baghdassarian and Schug met with members of the Conflict Transformation Collaborative and faculty involved in the Beyond the Page initiative, a cohort of teaching artists using theater to transform learning. Baghdassarian shared a play script she wrote in high school with Beyond the Page director and Bread Loaf School of English faculty member Craig Maravich, sparking a dialogue on how oral histories can transition from written transcripts onto the stage to reach new audiences.
“My art form, the theater, is that space that brings people together in the room, in the moment to be in dialogue with issues that they’re facing, and with the experience of what it is to be human,” Maravich said. “That sort of process of collecting stories and re-remembering them and then sharing them again is a whole other kind of depth of what theater could do.”
Special Collections director Chris Burns (center) points out a passage in one of Special Collections’ Armenian holdings ahead of Rerooted’s hourlong roundtable with archivists and librarians.
An Energizing Connection
The centerpiece of the visit was a public keynote address titled “The Justice of Being Heard: Acknowledgment, Memory, and the Work of Peace.” Attended by more than 65 students, faculty, and local residents, the evening featured traditional Armenian pastries catered by Vermont baker, and member of the Eastern Armenian Relief Society “Noor” Chapter of Vermont, Pearl Teague. Guests included members of Vermont’s Armenian community, among them author Chris Bohjalian, alongside Baghdassarian’s parents.
For Baghdassarian and Schug, the time shared with members of the College community offered an opportunity to reflect on their nine-year trajectory from student grantees to international human rights advocates. For Middlebury, it served as a clear demonstration of how learning and scholarly research on campus ripples outward to impact global advocacy.
“Thank you to the whole Projects for Peace and Conflict Transformation teams for your continued support and belief in our work, and your endless empathy and dedication for such impactful causes,” Baghdassarian said following the visit. “Being on campus with you all was energizing.”
