What We Carry: An Armenian Journey through Memory, Place and Belonging
Tuesday, September 15, 2026 @ 7 PM
Speaker: Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom
AGBU Alex & Marie Manoogian School
22001 Northwestern Highway
Southfield, MI 48075
What do Armenians carry with them when home exists partly as a place, partly as a memory, and partly as something lost? In this personal and illustrated lecture, Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom reflects on how his own life and travels led him to study Armenians whose lives connect Turkey, France, and the wider diaspora. Through family histories, research encounters, and photographs of churches, neighborhoods, cemeteries, and other community spaces, he will tell stories of people who have preserved a relationship to places from which they or their ancestors were separated. The lecture explores, in accessible terms, how memory and belonging endure across borders and generations--and how Armenians continue to make meaningful lives in the presence of loss.
Dr. Hakem Al-Rustom is an anthropologist and historian whose work focuses on Christians in and of of the Middle East, particularly Armenians in Turkey and France. He is the author of Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide (Columbia University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation (University of California Press, 2010). Dr. Al-Rustom has taught anthropology and history at the London School of Economics, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Michigan.
Books will be available for purchase at a discounted price -- cash only.
