4 p.m. 
142 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

Lecture Abstract:

With their recent book, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979 (Stanford University Press, 2025), Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women’s organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran’s central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties.

Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism, and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of “the archive” and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran’s history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.

Speakers’ Bios

Houri Berberian is Professor of History, Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies, and Director of the Center for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Armenian history, especially revolutionary movements and women and gender. Her books include Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911: “The Love for Freedom Has No Fatherland” (2001); and the multiple award-winning Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (2019); and Reflections of Armenian Identity in History and Historiography (2018), coedited with Touraj Daryaee. Her most recent book, for which she has received grants from the Persian Heritage Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, is The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity (2025), coauthored with Talinn Grigor.

Talinn Grigor is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 18th- to 20th-century architectural and art histories through postcolonial, race, feminist, and critical theories grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, Armenia, and Parsi India. Her books include the winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, The Persian Revival (2021), Contemporary Iranian Art (2014), Building Iran (2009), and Persian Kingship and Architecture (2015), coedited with Sussan Babaie. Grigor has received fellowships from the National Gallery of Art, Getty Research Institute, Cornell’s Humanities Center, Princeton’s Persian Center, MIT’s Aga Khan Program, SSRC, and Persian Heritage and Calouste Gulbenkian foundations. Her last book is coauthored with Houri Berberian, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979(2025). Her current book project, The Hyphenated Architect, examines the pivotal role of ethnically Armenian architects and artists in the proliferation of the Modern Movement in West Asia.

https://events.berkeley.edu/armenian/event/283966-the-armenian-woman-minoritarian-agency-and-the