I am a student of late Ottoman cultural history broadly and of Armenophone and Armeno-Turkish print culture in particular. My current project centers upon the circulation of Armenian newspapers globally in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when the vernacular Armenian press first began to emerge in earnest in the major cities of the Ottoman and Russian empires.
My research aims to understand how these periodicals—even when they were poorly funded and remained in print for only short periods of time—were able to acquire readerships, however small, that spanned Eurasia, sometimes extending into North Africa, the Dutch East Indies, and the Americas. In my attempt to investigate how these networks of subscription came into being, I am necessarily concerned with the status of these journals primarily as material objects.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, I attended Armenian Mesrobian School before completing my undergraduate education in English and History at UCLA. After teaching high school for a year in my hometown, I enrolled in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, where I wrote my thesis on the coverage of the 1862 Zeytun affair in Armenian periodicals printed in the Ottoman and Russian empires.