Ayşenur Korkmaz
Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies
2019-2020

Ayşenur Korkmaz is a PhD candidate in European Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Korkmaz earned her BA in History from Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey and her MA in Nationalism Studies from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She has received multiple fellowships and awards during her education, including a full tuition scholarship to Istanbul Bilgi University, the 2013 Zoryan Institute and University of Toronto Genocide and Human Rights Program Scholarship, and a 2016 travel grant from the Hrant Dink Foundation. She has presented on her research at conferences across the world including the 2018 NIOD conference “Mass Violence and the Kurds” and the 2017 UC Berkeley conference “New Directions in Armenian-Ottoman and Armenian-Turkish Studies.” She has published multiple articles and book chapters, including several entries in the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe and a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume Collective Violence, Exclusion, and Construction of National Identity in Turkey (2019). She has worked as a teaching assistant in the History department at Sabancı University, Turkey and as a project coordinator for Armenian-Turkish reconciliation for the “Divided Past, Joint Future” IPA project. 

During her time at the Center, Korkmaz conducted research with Visual History Archive testimonies of survivors of the Armenian Genocide in order to explore “the sense of rootedness and spatial belonging among Armenians who fled their homes during the genocide and sought refuge to the Caucasus which later became their ‘new homeland’, Armenia.” She has already conducted eight months of fieldwork in the Aragatsotn region of present-day Armenia, where genocide survivors and their descendants have resided since their displacement from their ancestral hometowns. Korkmaz hopes to use Visual History Archive testimonies of first-generation survivors to inform and contextualize the information she has gathered in her fieldwork interviews with second-generation survivors.