About

I am an interdisciplinary scholar, translator, and avid postcard writer. Originally from New York, I began my academic career studying literature and creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College. Since then, I have called Armenia, Italy, and Turkey home. I received my PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania (summer 2025) and have newly been appointed Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the American University of Armenia. I’ve worked previously as a Civic and Cultural Education teacher (K–12) in Armenia, a university lecturer of English language and literature in Turkey and in the United States, as well as an ESL instructor, and still continue my work as a freelance editor and project consultant for exhibitions, screenplays, creative projects, and academic works.

In 2010 I moved to the Venetian lagoon to pursue a Laurea Magistrale (Master of Arts) in Asia meridionale e occidentale: lingue, culture e istituzioni (Southwestern Asia: Languages, Cultures & Institutions) & Armenian Studies at the Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Italy. There, I specialized in the history of the Ottoman Empire and the South Caucasus, and Translation Studies. My years in Venice culminated in my first translation monograph—Shushan Avagyan’s 2006 novel Գիրք-անվերնագիր (A Book, Untitled) from Eastern Armenian to English—in partial fulfillment of my MA in 2014. In 2023, the translation finally “came to light” through AWST Press (USA) and Tilted Axis Press (UK & world).

I first lived in Istanbul between 2013 and 2016, where I pursued another MA degree in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University. Becoming more immersed in the lesbifem/queer community of Istanbul while also being academically steeped in critical, feminist, and marxist theory at university, I wrote my Master’s thesis in Turkey on a topic closer to my New York home. It is called “(Dis)orienting exile: Home and Belonging in Queer Armenian-American Women’s Memoir.” Based primarily on close textual analysis of the first two published memoirs by queer women in the Armenian transnation, I examine the various literary articulations of exile in Arlene Avakian’s Lion Woman’s Legacy (1992) and Nancy Agabian’s Me As Her Again (2008), and argue that these queer diasporic memoirs resist the reproduction of the nationalist monoliths they write against, opening alternative modes of existence and life for queer diasporic women.

After eight years abroad, I moved to Philadelphia in 2017 to begin my doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania in the Program of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. There, I was a graduate affiliate of the Middle East Center, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women Studies Certificate Program. My dissertation, “From Kin to Kind: Armenian Racialization and the Mediation of the ‘Human’ in the Late-to-Post Ottoman Empire,” takes a posthumanist reading of the Armenian case to show how the speciated category of the “human”—and its gendered, racial subdivisions—was modulated through the emerging human-nonhuman divide alongside the late Ottoman border regime. I introduce the concept of “kindification”—the breakdown of kinships and communal Ottoman lifeworlds by species, race, and gendered kind—to trace a movement in how “kin” turn into “kind,” ideologically enabling racialization through a concept of disposable “animals” versus proper “human” subject/citizens of the late Ottoman state.

I have two book projects in the works. The first is an extension of my doctoral work, tentatively titled From Kin to Kind: Mediating the Human, the Animal, and the Armenian in the Late-to-Post Ottoman Empire. The second is From Black Exiles to Black Selves: Reclaiming Armenian Otherness through Black-Writing. The book hinges on Shushan Avagyan’s concept of “black writing,” or sevakrel, as a method of decolonial study. It will explore AI technologies and the neo-imperial practices of ancestry and DNA testing companies that, through the marketing of racialization, reinforce “race” as an organizational category as well as “whiten” its consumers in the neoliberal era. I will juxtapose this with the blackening of Armenians in the Ottoman, Soviet, and post-socialist contexts, analyzing contemporary literary works that re-deploy their racial abjection as black(ened) others of the ex-empires’ colonial frontiers towards anti-imperial struggles. 

Connecting these discourses back to their historical roots in the ethnominority racializations of the ex-empires, I aim to make a claim about racialization through animalization that extends beyond ethnic and area studies, engaging more robustly with black studies and race in the age of global capital. As such, my work sits at the intersection of critical theory, postcolonialism, feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, posthumanism, and theories of the nation, translation, and the archive. 

My articles and translations have appeared in The Hopkins Review, ASAP/Journal: Special Issue on Autotheory, Social Text, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (Routledge 2023), Critical Approaches to Armenian Identity in the 21st Century: Fragility, Resilience and Transformation (Hrant Dink Foundation Press 2020), the Armenian Review, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote. My first translation monograph, A Book, Untitled (Girq-anvernagir) by Shushan Avagyan, was released with AWST Press (USA) and Tilted Axis Press (UK & world) in 2023. It is the winner of the 2023 English PEN Translates Award, the 2024 Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize for Translation, and the 2024 Society of Authors’ TA First Book Prize. My translation excerpt of The Women of Zarubyan Street (Zarubyani Kanayq), a text/image novel by Shushan Avagyan and lucine talalyan, won the 2024 Anne Frydman Translation Prize. I am newly slated to begin the English translation of Anna Davtyan’s Khanna. In 2019, I co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective.

In addition to my theoretical work, I am co-writing “Չünքüşաbaտum: The Dictionary of (In)animate Objects and Tales of Hearsay”—a digital humanities, book, and exhibition project with an Istanbul-based urban architect on the legacies of shared family trauma and redactive methods of archiving. The project seeks to unfix the hegemonic, patriarchal architectures of histories and geographies in their current nationalized frames.