The idea of “Armenia” far predates the modern fixed borders of the Republic of Armenia. Reaching deep into antiquity, this ancient land has been known to history as one of rich cultural heritage, constant imperial conquest, unthinkable tragedy, economic upheaval, and, now, tenuous independence. As much as the land itself, so, too, do the people of Armenia find themselves navigating constant fluctuations in identity and perception. The Armenians and their land find historical attestation before the Old Testament and, from there, have survived subsumption into the Achaemenid, Roman, Abbasid, Ottoman, and Soviet empires – to name only a few. Having established the world’s first national Christian church in CE 301, its people inherit the legacies of Zoroastrian and Islamic dominion. Despite such vertiginous and dynamic changes over time, Armenia and its people—both nationals and diasporans—exhibit remarkable continuity with an ancient population and a diaspora that has been “global” since before modern globalization. The Armenian diaspora has multiplied many times the size of its national citizenry—roughly three million in the Republic of Armenia versus an estimated ten million globally—with communities on every inhabited continent.

Spotlighting this vast diversity of Armenian identities across time and place, this panel will explore a broad transhistorical gamut in experiences of being Armenian from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically, it will begin with Ashley Bozian’s paper, “Optics of Identity and Alterity in Medieval Armenian Texts, CE 405-1045,” which addresses medieval Armenian literary representation of the body and its discursive mobilization as a mechanism by which to distinguish Armenian bodies from those of ethnoreligious others. Following this, Asya Darbinyan’s paper, “Reconnecting to the Past: Memory, Material Culture, and Armenian Diasporic Identity,” investigates the role of material culture in connecting second- and third-generation descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors in the diaspora to their Armenian origins. Pietro Shakarian will continue with his paper, “From the Honest Will of the People: Popular Democracy and Nagorno-Karabakh in the Era of Khrushchev’s Thaw,” which will examine the politics of self-determination and ethnic identity in Nagorno-Karabakh and Soviet Armenia during the reforms of Nikita Khrushchev. The panel will conclude with a paper by Aleksandr V. Gevorkyan, “Individualism vs Common Good: Exploring the Driving Forces in the Armenian Diaspora’s Engagement with Armenia—A Survey-Based Analysis,” which interrogates the relationship of the global Armenian diaspora to the Republic of Armenia and considers the multilayered political, economic, cultural, and historical identities that shape that relationship.

Together, these four papers offer a diverse and comprehensive approach to the historically complex and ever-evolving issue of Armenian identity. Academic inquiries into Armenian identity are often relegated to narrow disciplinary specialties, even within the historical profession where they are often confined to narrow date ranges. The goal of this panel is to unite a multiplicity of disciplinary and chronological approaches to examining Armenian identity, bringing each of these valuable perspectives into conversation with one another.