The Center for Armenian Studies (CAS) at the University of Michigan is one of the largest and most prestigious academic institutions dedicated to advancing Armenian Studies outside of Armenia itself. As a result, the program has attracted a large body of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and scholars who are either directly working in Armenian Studies or who are invested in the intersections between Armenian Studies and a wide array of other fields. While academic interest in Armenian Studies is arguably greater than ever thanks to CAS’s organization of conferences and public events, at one point it lacked an institutional space for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and scholars to meet regularly, discuss their own research, and engage in productive intellectual exchange.
In 2012, former CAS graduate students Michael Pifer (Comparative Literature) and Alison Vacca (Near Eastern Studies) tried to address this problem. “We wanted to create a forum which would allow those interested in Armenian Studies to meet formally and informally to share their work,” Pifer said. “At the same time, we wanted to include the greater U-M academic community in these meetings as much as possible.”
Thanks to a generous grant from the Rackham Graduate School in the fall of 2012 Vacca and Pifer founded the Multidisciplinary Workshop for Armenian Studies (MWAS). Since then, MWAS has received grants for continuing its work. Leading the Multidisciplinary Workshop for Armenian Studies (MWAS) this year are PhD students Nazelie Doghramadjian (Information), Allison Grenda (History of Art), and Emma Avagyan (Middle East Studies).. Professor Gottfried Hagen, Director of CAS, serves as the faculty sponsor of the interdisciplinary group. Additionally, CAS Academic Programming Specialist Vicken Mouradian supports MWAS as its Departmental Financial Administrator. While MWAS is not directly related to CAS, it seeks to complement the programming that CAS offers by providing scholars the opportunity to collaborate on campus and receive insightful feedback on their research projects.
Perhaps most importantly, MWAS has and will continue to encourage graduate students to write regularly and workshop their dissertation chapters, conference papers, works-in-progress, and article drafts in a supportive atmosphere. MWAS will also help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to enrich their own multidisciplinary vocabularies while discussing cutting-edge articles and monographs from a variety of perspectives, thus breaking down the disciplinary insularity which exists within Armenian Studies.
Finally, MWAS invites scholars who utilize Armenian sources in their own scholarship, yet who are traditionally considered beyond the realm of Armenian Studies, to present their own research in public lectures and graduate student-run workshops. As a result, MWAS aims to enrich the research of local students and scholars within Armenian Studies. Moreover, MWAS aims to broaden the field of Armenian Studies by including new voices in these discussions, thereby, bringing Armenian Studies to wider critical discussions in the greater academic community. We hope the workshop will make a positive contribution to the intellectual community at U-M for years to come.
If you would like to be added to the MWAS community list, please email armenianstudies@umich.edu to be connected with the organizers.