Society for Armenian Studies Winter 2025 Graduate Research and Conference Grants Recipients
FRESNO — The Society for Armenian Studies announced the recipients of its Winter 2025 Graduate Research and Conference Grants. The four recipients are: Astghik Hakobyan, for her research on “Production, Circulation, and Reception of Spurious (Non-Canonical) Religious Texts among Armenian Communities in the Ottoman and Safavid Worlds (17th–18th Centuries)”; Arthur Ipek, for his research and translation work, “Workshopping Chahan Chahnour’s Komitas, Unbound as Case Study for Western Armenian”; Sahika Karatepe, for travel to the ARF and Project SAVE archives in Massachusetts, to complete her dissertation on “Labor, Gender, Nature and the Politics of Expropriation: Armenian Peasantry in the Bardizag Region of the Ottoman Empire (1790-1924)”; and Orhun Yalçin, for travel to archives in Turkey for his project, “History of Artvin and Kars in the mid-nineteenth century, during the Tanzimat period (1839–1876).”
Each of the winning recipients will receive a $1,000 grant awarded by the Society.
SAS President Barlow Der Mugrdechian congratulated all of the awardees. “SAS is pleased to support such promising young scholars achieve their goals. The nature and the depth of their research demonstrates the multi-disciplinary aspect of Armenian Studies as a field of inquiry,” said Der Mugrdechian. “We encourage other young scholars to join SAS and to share their research.”
Recipients expressed their thoughts on their awards.
“I am profoundly grateful to the Society for Armenian Studies for this grant, which directly supports my doctoral research on non-canonical texts in early modern Armenian communities. The award enables essential archival research, including work at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and contributes both to the preservation of Armenian written heritage and to new insights into Armenian religious and intellectual history, for which I am sincerely thankful,” said Astghik Hakobyan.
“Receiving a grant from the Society for Armenian Studies is meaningful to me as a junior researcher because it reaffirms the value of translation as a scholarly practice. Through my translation of Shahan Shahnour’s essay on the genius of Komitas, I hope to bring voices of Armenian literature into wider circulation and to make the model of artistic creation explained in the essay and my annotations accessible to contemporary scholars and creators alike,” stated Arthur Ipek.
“I am honored to have received this grant, which I will use to conduct archival research in Boston, working with the ARF Archive, Project SAVE, and other collections essential to completing my dissertation. My research examines the transformation of the Armenian peasantry in the Bardizag region of the Ottoman Empire between 1790 and 1924, focusing on the intersections of labor regimes, environmental extraction, gender, and imperial violence. I am deeply proud of this support, as it recognizes the importance of my research on Armenian labor, gender, and violence and allows me to bring this project to fruition,” said Sahika Karatepe.
“The Society for Armenian Studies Graduate Research Grant supported the final stage of my doctoral research in Turkey. This stage significantly strengthened the depth of my work on nineteenth-century Armenian provincial life,” stated Orhun Yalçin.
The Society of Armenian Studies is an international body, composed of scholars and students, whose aims are to promote the study of Armenian culture and society, including history, language, literature, and social, political, and economic questions; to facilitate the exchange of scholarly information pertaining to Armenian studies around the world; and to sponsor panels and conferences on Armenian studies.
