From Paris to Yerevan: Communist Armenian Women and the Post-WWII Soviet Repatriation Campaign

Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu

4 p.m. 
3335 Dwinelle Hall, South Dr, Berkeley, CA 94720 

Armenian women participated in the French Resistance against the Nazis during WWII. Many of these women were former Ottoman subjects and some were survivors of the Armenian Genocide or their daughters. In 1942, they founded the Union des femmes arméniennes in Paris, which remained an underground organization until liberation. After the war’s conclusion and in response to Stalin-approved repatriation campaigns in Soviet Armenia, the Union promoted the communist fatherland as a feminist heaven. In a way, then, the fatherland was the true motherland. This paper delves into the hitherto unknown history of Armenian working-class women’s political subjectivities in postwar Europe.

Speaker’s Bio:

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History and the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at MIT. Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey,came out from Stanford University Press in 2016. Dr. Ekmekcioglu has published articles on various topics, including Armenian demands at the 1923 Lausanne Conference, an Armenian woman’s memoirs about her years at Constantinople’s Central Prison during WWI, and French Armenian communist women’s organizing in post-war Paris for repatriation to Soviet Armenia. Currently, Dr. Ekmekcioglu is co-authoring a book and digital humanities project titled Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology and Documentary Archive (IUP Ottomanica, 2025).Contact Info:

Dzovinar Derderian, armenian@berkeley.edu