A collection of hundreds of pages of notes and original research, photocopies from scholarly works, and personal papers from Loretta Topalian Nassar has recently been processed and is now available for the interested public to view at the Zohrab Information Center.
The collection was processed by Linda Smith, an archival intern at the Zohrab Center who is a graduate student in New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program.
Loretta Topalian Nassar was born in Romania in 1936, the youngest of three girls. Her parents both came from Armenian families of textile merchants and her father opened his first textile factory in the city of Galatz. The family escaped the upheaval occurring in Romania during the 1940s and moved to Alexandria, Egypt in 1947.
Nassar attended the University of Leicester, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1959. She met Alfred Nassar in Lebanon, and they married and had three children before emigrating to the United States. At Columbia University, she worked for many years as the Director of the Society of Fellows. While there, she was encouraged by Prof. Nina Garsoïan to pursue a doctorate in Armenian history, which she worked on over the course of several decades. She focused on Armenian and world history in the early modern period and began a dissertation on Joseph Emin, which was never completed. Much of the material in this collection relates to her graduate study and research.
Joseph Emin was an Armenian born in 1726 in Hamadan, Iran. He was raised in Calcutta, India, and went to London as a young man, where he received an education and fought in the Seven Years’ War. Later in life, he attempted to work towards Armenia’s liberation from Persian and Ottoman rule by visiting the leaders of several nations (Russia, Georgia, Karabakh, and Armenia itself) and trying to garner favor and support for this purpose. During his lengthy travels, he tried to spread the message of the European Enlightenment among his compatriots. He encountered resistance from the Armenian clerical elite of the time, who believed that Enlightenment thinking threatened the authority of the church and jeopardized Armenians living under Ottoman rule.
He published his memoir in London in 1792, entitled The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin the Armenian Written in English by Himself. He is considered the first Asian person to travel from India to Britain and write an account of those experiences in a European language. His great-great-granddaughter Amy Apcar published a second edition of the memoir in 1918, revising the original account and adding letters and documents by Emin and those he corresponded with. Today, he is celebrated in Armenia as a national hero and one of the pioneers of the Armenian national liberation movement. Loretta’s aim in her dissertation was to challenge the standard reception of Emin and also to explain the differences between the two editions of his autobiography.
Over the years, Nassar took classes at The Writing Center in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, as she worked on her writing skill both in preparation for writing her thesis and as a creative and personal endeavor in its own right. Loretta was also part of the Cresskill Writers Group that met at the public library in Cresskill, New Jersey. She published a collection of short stories and poems entitled Hors D’oeuvres in 2004.
Another series in the collection focuses on her correspondence with different individuals throughout her life. The bulk of the correspondence is with Sebouh Aslanian, whom she knew from Aslanian’s time at Columbia. Prof. Aslanian is currently the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA. His research on early modern Armenian merchants from Persia and India intersects with some of Nassar’s own areas of interest and research. While much of her correspondence with Aslanian and others is about research interests, there is also a personal component to much of the material.
This collection provides visitors with a comprehensive picture of the inner workings of Nassar’s scholarly research and writing practice from the 1990s through the early 2010s, in a time where computers were becoming increasingly prevalent but handwritten note-taking, manual bibliography and analysis was still the norm. There is a wealth of material on Joseph Emin and related topics, including Armenian merchants and travel writing from Europeans visiting the Near East throughout the 1700s especially. There is also much material pertaining to writing and several creative fiction and creative nonfiction pieces written by Nassar, which show her growth as a writer and attest to her personal journey as she struggled to make progress on her dissertation writing and sought other outlets of literary expression.
This collection of Nassar’s personal papers is available for researchers to view in the Zohrab Information Center’s library. A finding aid of the collection is available to view here.