An interview with Dr. Khatchig Mouradian
Dr. Khatchig Mouradian is the first Armenian Genocide scholar to record an interactive biography with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony program. Beginning this month, his testimony is available to educators and students worldwide through the IWitness platform.
A leading voice in Armenian Genocide scholarship, Dr. Mouradian has been recognized for his influential research and award-winning publications. His book, The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915–1918 (2021), received multiple accolades for its original research and contributions to the field. He also co-edited After the Ottomans: Genocide’s Long Shadow and Armenian Resilience (2023) and The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (forthcoming 2025), works that further illuminate questions of genocide, resilience, and historical memory.
Dr. Mouradian brings this depth of expertise to multiple academic and research roles. He is a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University and serves as the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress. He is Co-Principal Investigator of the Armenian Genocide Denial Project at NYU’s Global Institute for Advanced Study and editor of The Armenian Review, a leading peer-reviewed journal. Since 2024, he has also been a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
The following interview was conducted using his testimony.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Khatchig Mouradian. I was born in Lebanon. My grandparents are child survivors of the Armenian Genocide. I am a lecturer at Columbia University, and I also serve as the Armenian and Georgian specialist at the Library of Congress. I'm a historian by profession, and one of my research topics is the Armenian Genocide and its legacies.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Armenian Genocide?
The most significant misconception about the Armenian Genocide is that it is a controversial subject. In many ways, the semblance of controversy is manufactured, is very much the product of the Turkish denial campaigns. But any kind of sober exploration of the Armenian Genocide, discussion of the scholarship, makes it clear that there is absolutely no controversy involved. We are talking about a genocide that is universally accepted, universally acknowledged by scholars, by academics. We are talking about a crime that many conscientious scholars within Turkey have acknowledged and have spent their lives studying. So in many ways, this impression among some that the Armenian Genocide is a controversial topic is a massive misconception that only propagates the misconception itself.
How much of your work was inspired by your grandparents' experience as survivors of the Armenian Genocide?
My work and my career path were inspired by two things. One was the experiences of my grandparents and great-grandparents during the Armenian Genocide and the subsequent challenges and hardships they faced as they moved to Lebanon. And the other was the fact that I grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War and that conflict also informed my interest in studying history and mass violence and the way in which past injustices can be addressed and hopefully even remedied.
How could you be an impartial researcher if your grandparents were survivors?
The denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish state is arguably the only reason why the issue of the impartiality of Armenian scholars of the Genocide becomes an issue. It would be unimaginable to raise similar questions for some other well-known cases of genocide.
Holocaust studies today would be a very underdeveloped field without the tremendous contributions of Jewish scholars of the Holocaust. Yet when it comes to the Armenian experience, and precisely because of the Turkish state's denial, there is that inclination for some to ask about impartiality. However, after three decades of sustained, rigorous scholarly work, fortunately we are at a point largely, again, thanks to several prominent Armenian scholars, like Vahakn Dadrian, Richard Hovannisian, Raymond Kevorkian, as well as several Turkish scholars, we have come to a point where I can sit down and write the history of the Armenian Genocide without having to justify my motivations and my impartiality, and feeling confident that my work is going to speak for itself.
How do you approach teaching your students about the Armenian Genocide?
Genocide is about death, destruction, and loss. And I never start my classes on genocide with the murders, the massacres, the theft of property. I start with life before, and in fact I allocate as much time to giving the students an appreciation of life in the communities that were targeted before the massacres happened.
I want them to not learn about the community when people are dying. I want them to appreciate their life, their art, their culture. And this is all the more important when I'm teaching about the Armenian Genocide. Because many students do not know much about Armenian culture, Armenian history. So I start with that. I start with life. And then I cover the genocide, its consequences, and I don't end there. I make sure that I allocate some time as well to life after, to the rebuilding.
It is very important where we start a story, and where we end it. And I make sure that I start with life, and I end it with revival.
What aspect of Armenian Genocide are you most interested in?
I am most interested in challenging the narrative of victimhood in the scholarship and in the public discourse on the Armenian Genocide. I challenge, with my work, with my research, with my scholarship, the depiction of Armenians as passive recipients of violence on the one hand, and humanitarianism and charity on the other. My work portrays Armenians as actors, as agents, people who organized and pushed back.
My study and exploration of resistance demonstrates that even when they had no access to weapons Armenians organized and came together and tried to find ways of pushing back against the genocidal onslaught, found ways of assisting one another, and surviving through the ordeal of genocide. And integrating this narrative of resistance, the resistance of women, children, and men to the Armenian Genocide into that greater narrative of the Armenian Genocide is a central part of my scholarship.
So we know that it is told that history is written by the winners and records are kept by the winners. How do you verify your sources?
One of the most gratifying aspects of being a historian for me is the ability to bring together different archives, different sources from different parts of the world, sometimes in different languages, and make a compelling argument or confirm which narrative, which particular details that the records describe can be triangulated, can be verified with the use of other sources and records for a greater appreciation and understanding of historical events and processes.
How do you keep the balance of reading about all these terrible events and try to keep yourself calm and then approach the research in an objective way?
When studying difficult topics like genocide and mass violence, it is understandably very difficult to separate oneself, to distance oneself from the subject of one's study. And it is also understandable that we will often be impacted by the material that we are reading. And different individuals, different scholars, of course, will have different reactions to this. In my case, I am fortunate to be able to disconnect from the material that I'm exploring as soon as I leave my desk. In my everyday life, I am a very cheerful person, and I would like to believe that that cheerfulness, in fact, allows me to do my work with more enthusiasm, and allows me to come back to my work over and over again without burnout. So, as difficult as the material I deal with, is and can be, I know, unlike those who went through genocide, unlike those who are suffering from the consequences of genocide, I can close the book and leave my desk, take a deep breath, and appreciate the luxuries of not being in such a situation.