Roving Revolutionaries and Connected Revolutions: Armenians and the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian Revolutions

ANN ARBOR, MI — The Multidisciplinary Workshop for Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan will present a lecture by Professor Houri Berberian titled “Roving Revolutionaries and Connected Revolutions: Armenians and the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian Revolutions”. The event will be held on Wednesday, March 25, 4:00 PM at 1022 South Thayer, 202 S. Thayer St. Ann Arbor Michigan.

The talk will explore the interconnectivity of the Russian (1905), Ottoman (1908), and Iranian (1905-1911) revolutions in several ways that interweave the global and the local. The study advocates a novel approach to the three revolutions that draws on a “connected histories” approach, which illuminates the way in which the revolutions are connected and transformed through their connections. It does this through an archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and literature, largely in the form of printed periodicals and pamphlets. The protagonists of the study are the roving Armenian revolutionaries and activists who traversed the borders of the three states preparing, collaborating in, and spreading revolution within and across fluid state boundaries and across progressive, constitutional movements. Because of their participation in all three revolutions, their border-crossings within the region and beyond, their adoption and interpretation of and adaptation to such influential and global ideologies as socialism and constitutionalism, Armenian revolutionaries become ideal subjects for the retelling of the complex story of connected revolutions – a story of revolutionary linkages and of local and regional actors with global ties to big ideas and ideologies.

Houri Berberian is Professor of History at California State University, Long Beach. Her recent articles include “Connected Revolutions: Armenians and the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian Revolutions in the Early Twentieth Century” (2012), and “History, Memory, and Iranian-Armenian Memoirs of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution” (2008).