SYDNEY: New York Times bestselling author and Rebar Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University, Peter Balakian is the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee’s (AGCC) special guest speaker for this year’s Armenian Genocide Commemorative events.
Professor Balakian will be in Australia for two weeks, lecturing and speaking in Sydney and Melbourne about the Armenian Genocide. His first public appearance will be as keynote speaker of the Sydney Armenian Genocide Commemoration, which will be held at UTS Kurin-gai Campus’ Greenhalgh Theatre on Sunday, April 20.
Prof. Balakian is the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003), which received the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize (best book in English on the subject of human rights and genocide) and was a New York Times Notable Book and New York Times bestseller.
The Burning Tigris is a narrative of the massacres of the Armenians in the 1890s and the 1915 Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. It presents the chilling history of how the Young Turk government implemented the first modern-day genocide behind the cover of World War I.
Prof. Balakian is also the author of Black Dog of Fate; his personal memoire and the unfolding of his sense of identity as he traces his childhood and the history of his ancestors.
Prof. Balakian has received many awards and prizes including a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1999; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 2004; and the New Jersey Council for the Humanities Book Award, 1998.
AGCC representative, Mr. Stephen Abolakian said: “We are honoured to have Prof. Balakian join us in Australia to assist our community, as we continue to raise awareness of genocide in the hope that such hateful crimes are not repeated.â€
Further details of Armenian Genocide Commemorative events in
Sydney can be found by
clicking here and in
Melbourne by
clicking here.
During the last days of the Ottoman Empire, the Government implemented a policy of Genocide upon its Christian Armenian population. As a result, up to 1.5million Armenian men, women and children lost their lives between 1915 and 1922. The Armenian Genocide is yet to be recognised by the Turkish Government.
