The Zohrab Information Center is pleased to announce the first Enrichment Evening of 2019 with Asya Darbinyan on Thursday, January 17th at 7 PM in the Guild Hall of the Armenian Diocese at 630 Second Ave. Asya Darbinyan will present her talk, Mass Population Movement, Humanitarian Emergency, and the Armenian Refugee Assistance at the Caucasus Front of WWI. A reception will follow.

This Enrichment Evening, the first of 2019, is part of the Winter/Spring Series at the Zohrab Information Center on Migration. The full schedule of this series will be announced shortly. It will cover early modern movements of Armenians between Empires, late Ottoman migration from the provinces to Istanbul, what happens to ethnic and religious aspects of identity in Diaspora, and much more. The series aims to consider a highly relevant contemporary issue, namely migration, through the lens of Armenian history and the experience of Armenian Christians.

This first talk in the series, by Asya Darbinyan, takes us to the Caucasus Front during World War I. Situated between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, where the First Republic of Armenia would emerge in 1918, the front saw many important battles as well as incredible horrors. In additional to the genocidal policies of the Triumvirate of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ravages of war contributed to one of the most drastic refugee crises the world had yet seen. Asya Darbinyan, PhD candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, takes us to the Caucasus Front during World War I, detailing the humanitarian emergency there and the assistance provided to Armenian refugees.

Asya Darbinyan is a PhD Candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University (Worcester, MA). Her dissertation explores the Russian Empire’s response to the Armenian Genocide and to the refugee crisis at the Caucasus front of the Great War (advisor – Dr. Taner Akçam).

Previously, Darbinyan worked at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan, as a senior research fellow and the Deputy Director of the museum (2008- 2013). She was awarded multiple scholarships and grants to pursue archival research in Geneva, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, Yerevan, and elsewhere. She has presented at a number of international academic conferences and workshops, and has scholarly articles published in Armenian and in English, and a co-authored chapter in the volume Plight and Fate of Children During and Following Genocide – Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review.