SYDNEY: The Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee (AGCC) of Australia has announced that Dr. Ümit Kurt will keynote the first in-person National Armenian Genocide Commemoration evening after three years of Covid-induced hiatus in Sydney, at the event which marks the 108th Anniversary of the Genocide of the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
This annual event, which will be held at The Concourse in Chatswood on Monday 24th April 2023, is regularly attended by approximately 1,000 members of the Sydney Armenian community, religious, political, NGO, media, diplomatic and academic leaders from across the country.
Dr. Ümit Kurt, an ethnically Kurdish citizen of Turkey, is a historian of the modern Middle East. His research is on the social, cultural, and economic history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a special focus on the Armenian Genocide and dispossession of Ottoman Armenians at large, imperial interests, ethnic politics, forced migrations and infrastructural transformations.
Dr. Kurt completed his dissertation in the Department of History at Clark University in the United States in 2016. He has since held several postdoctoral positions at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and the Polonsky Academy in the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Armenian Studies Program at California State University (CSU) in Fresno.
Currently, Dr. Kurt is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences (History) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has also been serving as a Vice Executive Secretary for the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS) since March 2020, and is the author of several books, including "The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province" and “Antep 1915: Genocide and Perpetrators” (?leti?im, 2018).
He is also the co-author of “The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide” (Berghahn, 2017), the co-editor of "Armenians and Kurds in the Late Ottoman Empire" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2020), "The Committee of Union and Progress: Founders, Ideology, and Structure" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2021), and "The State of the Art of the Early Turkish Republic Period: Historiography, Sources and Future Directions" (The Press at California State University, Fresno, 2022).
“We are pleased to be returning to an in-person commemoration of the Armenian Genocide after a forced break due to Covid, where the Armenian-Australian community and our guests will have the pleasure of hearing from Dr. Umit Kurt, who is one of the most active scholars on the events of 1915, for the first time,” said Michael Kolokossian of the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee.
The National Armenian Genocide Commemoration on Monday, 24th April 2023 will open the doors of The Concourse in Chatswood at 7:00pm, with a 7:30pm start. The programme will also feature political speeches, as well as cultural acts.
The event is organised by the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee under the auspices of His Eminence Archbishop Haigazoun Najarian, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Catholic Church, and the Armenian Evangelical Church.
The member organisations of the Armenian Genocide Commemorative Committee are the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Armenian Missionary Association of Australia, Hamazkaine, Nor Serount, Homenetmen, Tekeyan, Armenian Relief Society, Dkhrouni, AGBU Youth, the Armenian Youth Federation and the Armenian National Committee of Australia.
