Jesse Siragan Arlen is the inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Armenian Christian Studies and Director of the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center, a newly arranged joint appointment between the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America and Fordham University.

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, he was raised in San Luis Obispo, California. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2011, earning a B.A. in Linguistics, summa cum laude, where he took Western Armenian classes for two years with Dr. Hagop Gulludjian.

Thereafter, he moved to the midwest, where he undertook his initial graduate studies. He earned an M.A. in Historical Theology from Wheaton College (Illinois) in 2013 and an M.A. in Early Christian Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. He then returned to UCLA, where he earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages & Cultures with a focus in Armenian studies (2021), writing his dissertation, entitled “A Window into the Tenth Century: The Life and Literary Works of Anania of Narek,” under the supervision of Prof. S. Peter Cowe. During his doctoral program, he was a recipient of the Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fund Fellowship from 2018–2021.

He has taught Classical Armenian at the University of Notre Dame and the Dumbarton Oaks/HMML summer language program to doctoral students and early career scholars, and has also taught contemporary Western Armenian literature and led creative writing workshops at the immersive Zarmanazan summer language program in France, as well as intermediate Western Armenian at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). 

His academic research pertains to Armenian monasticism and religious literature from late antiquity to the early modern period. His studies have appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Viator, Manuscripta, Hugoye, the Revue des études arméniennes, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, and he has contributed chapters to several edited volumes. For his academic publications, visit this page.

Jesse Arlen is also a writer of poetry and creative and critical prose in Western Armenian. His works have appeared in literary journals both in Armenia and the Diaspora, such as Inknagir, Hayeren Blog, Asbarez, and Pakine.