Three-time Fulbright scholar Anna Ohanian basks in the history of Concord

By Sarah Johnson

The Concord Bridge

Anna Ohanyan feels a constant pull toward the country where she was born over 5,000 miles away from here — yet she views Concord, where she has lived since 2005, as her true home. This is where she’s raised her three children, and its ties to America’s beginnings are omnipresent.

“There’s so much history,” she says, “and I love history.”

Born and raised in Armenia before it declared independence from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Ohanyan returns year after year. This summer, she’ll do the same for the start of her third Fulbright scholarship.

The Stonehill College professor received the Fulbright Global Scholar Award in May based on a proposal to explore how smaller states, like Armenia, manage to retain their agency while influencing much more powerful countries, such as Russia and China.

In May, Ohanyan, at right, accompanied her Stonehill students to Armenia, where they met with Vassilis Maragos, center, European Union delegation ambassador to Armenia. Photo courtesy of Anna Ohanyan

“I’m really thrilled. The decision process is very rigorous,” Ohanyan said. “It first goes through disciplinary review. There’s a committee, there’s multiple layers, and then it goes to the [U.S.] embassy.”

She says she’ll be working with EVN Report, a non-profit English-language news platform, to refine her writing and, she hopes, get the attention of government officials and advisers.

In addition to this upcoming trip and research she conducted in South Korea and Turkey, Ohanyan will visit Japan next June and Armenia again next summer. Eventually, her findings will be used for a book, titled “Strategic Shadows.”

Getting the news was a thrill, she said: “I had lost all hope of getting it. The decisions in the past came out in March, and this time around it was not till the end of May that the decisions were announced.”

Anna Ohanyan, far right, and her Stonehill students visited the Saint Gayane Monastery, which was built in the 7th century. Photo courtesy of Anna Ohanyan

Community connections

Ohanyan studied sociology at Yerevan State University before coming to the U.S. in 1995 to pursue a master’s in conflict resolution. She also has a master’s and a doctorate in political science from Syracuse University, where she met her husband, Aram Adourian.

They moved to Concord when she was pregnant with twins Isabelle and Elise. The twins are now in college; her youngest daughter attends Concord-Carlisle High School.

On a yearlong sabbatical from Stonehill, where she is the Richard B. Finnegan distinguished professor of political science and international relations, Ohanyan is preparing once again to dig deeper into a country that she finds endlessly fascinating. Her previous Fulbright scholar experiences included teaching global issues to university students in Armenia.

“Having been raised in the Soviet Union, I grew up without experiencing organic civic life or the kinds of voluntary associations that are often taken for granted in democratic societies,” she said.

Anna Ohanyan sits with her Stonehill students at Garni Temple, the only pre-Christian monument in Armenia. Photo courtesy of Anna Ohanyan

Her first exposure to that kind of civic engagement came as a teenager in newly independent Armenia, she says.

She also remembers visiting Armenian churches in the U.S. “and watching volunteers organize coffee hours after Sunday services, or seeing parents actively involved in their children’s schools” — the sort of simple, community-building acts “that we kind of take for granted in Concord.”

Those experiences, she says, led to her deep interest in what she calls civil connectivity and “profoundly influenced how I think about democratic theory, civil society, and the conditions necessary for sustaining peace and democratic governance.”

Ohanyan’s work has been noticed not only by the Fulbright program. It’s also come to the attention of the Kremlin: In 2023, Vladimir Putin sanctioned Ohanyan, who has written extensively on Russian foreign policy, along with hundreds of other American scholars.

She feels a responsibility to keep sharing what she learns.

“I don’t want to exaggerate what I do,” she says, “but I do think keeping the spotlight on conflicts, human rights abuses, things like that, I feel like I have to do my part to keep that region, Armenia, and Ukraine on the right side [of history].”