Oral Histories

The ARC has several hundred oral history tapes of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, and many volumes of their transcriptions. These tapes were made under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities when the former ARC Director, Dennis Papazian, was on leave from the University and stationed in Washington, D.C.

Oral History Interviews with Armenians from Baku, Azerbaijan

In 2015, Nona Shahnazarian, conducted a series of oral history interviews with members of the Armenian community in Baku, Azerbaijan who had to flee their native city in 1990 in the aftermath of the persecution by the militant nationalists among the Azerbaijani majority in the city. This instance of mass violence was part of the bloody conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh which has been persisting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis since 1988. Many of these Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan ended up settling in Michigan - in Lansing, metro Detroit, and Ann Arbor. 

Nona Shahnazarian is a social anthropologist and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography, the National Academy of Sciences, Yerevan, Armenia. In 2015 she was a Visiting Scholar at the ARC. 

Copies of these recorded interviews are held at the ARC. They are currently under embargo until Shahnazarian defends her doctoral dissertation in the near future. Thereafter, the copies held at the ARC will also become available for use by other researchers.