This essay challenges the ethnocentrism of the dominant literature on hikmet-i cedide, or the new philosophy, in the late Ottoman Empire. Hikmet-i cedide was “new” in the sense that it did not confine itself to theological discussions and interpretations of holy books. Instead, it found its source of inspiration in the principles of modern Western philosophy, and especially the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Auguste Comte’s positivism. The dominant literature reduces this hikmet-i cedide to the philosophical writings of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals. Problematizing such ethnocentrism, this essay gives an account of hikmet-i cedide from the perspective of Ottoman–Armenians’ early engagement with positivism and the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. It argues that Armenians’ philosophical discourses in the second half of the nineteenth century were characterized by a belief that the principles of the new philosophy were the sine qua non for national survival in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious context of the Empire. They were also characterized by a commitment to reconciling modern Western philosophy with religious attachments. However, this characterization should not be thought to be confined to so-called “Armenian philosophy” but may be generalized to broader late Ottoman thought.

The Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS) convened its first meeting at the University of Chicago in March 2000. Since then, the historical literature on not only the Armenian Genocide, but also Ottoman Armenians more generally, has grown ever more sophisticated. This essay takes stock of the growing visibility of Armenians in Ottoman historiography over the last two decades, and other developments. In particular, it asks why historical scholarship on Armenians has yet to have a transformative effect on the frameworks used to study the Ottoman Empire's history? The essay first identifies a series of obstacles that have prevented Armenian and Ottoman studies scholarship from developing a shared set of questions. It then offers suggestions for more carefully addressing the underlying problematics of empire that can bridge this divide without inadvertently reproducing national or regional paradigms that have long left an imprint on Ottoman historiography.

The anonymous Armenian commentary was transmitted together with the Armenian translation of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias (sixth century or earlier). It was composed in the Hellenizing style and commonly associated with the figure of David the Invincible, a philosopher of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria. This article presents a general structural analysis of the commentary followed by a comparative study and translation of its first chapter. It argues that the commentary was indeed written in the tradition of late antique Greek commentaries but was probably not associated with late Neoplatonism. The Armenian commentary shares many common features with Ammonius’ commentary, but also departs from it on many crucial aspects. From a philosophical standpoint, it has much more in common with Boethius’ and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentaries than with those of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria, thus suggesting an early writing date.

In the nineteenth-century South Caucasus, hundreds of local farmers and nomads petitioned Russian authorities to allow them to become Christians. Most of them were Muslims and specifically requested to join the Armenian Apostolic Church. This article explores religious conversions to Armenian Christianity on Russia's mountainous southern border with the Ottoman Empire and Iran. It demonstrates that tsarist reforms, chiefly the peasant reform and the sedentarization of nomads, accelerated labor migration within the region, bringing many Muslims, Yazidis, and Assyrians into an Armenian environment. Local anxieties over Russian colonialism further encouraged conversions. I argue that by converting to Armenian Christianity many rural South Caucasians benefited from a change in their legal status, which came with the right to move residence, access to agricultural land, and other freedoms. Russia's Jewish communities, on the other hand, saw conversion to Armenian Christianity as a legal means to circumvent discrimination and obtain the right to live outside of the Pale of Settlement. By drawing on converts’ petitions and officials’ decisions, this article illustrates that the Russian government emerged as an ultimate arbiter of religious conversions, evaluating the sincerity of petitioners’ faith and how Armenian they had become, while preserving the empire's religious and social hierarchies.

In this paper we investigate cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of copular clauses, focusing on agreement patterns in binominal structures [NP1 BE NP2]. Our starting point is the alternation between NP1 and NP2 agreement, which arises both within and across languages. This alternation is typically taken to be confined to specificational (i.e. inverted) clauses, and previous analyses have strongly identified NP2 agreement with the syntax of inversion. However, we show that NP2 agreement is attested in a broader range of contexts, specifically in (assumed identity) equative structures, suggesting that it should not be correlated with specificational syntax. We present contrasting data from two languages – Persian and Eastern Armenian – for which the syntax of copular clauses is understudied. Whereas in Persian we see NP2 agreement in specificational structures but NP1 agreement in assumed identity equatives, in Eastern Armenian both types of structure yield NP2 agreement. We argue that the contrast between Persian and Eastern Armenian supports an approach that takes the NP1–NP2 alternation to arise as a phi-sensitivity in the probe–goal mechanics of Agree in a minimalist framework. Under this view, NP2 agreement is independent of syntactic inversion and is the result of the probe structure being articulated in such a way that certain NPs fail to Agree.

The decisions of international courts and tribunals affect how we read history. Alternative tribunals, such as peoples’ tribunals, attempt to write alternative histories to counter the official versions. This article locates controversies over the Armenian genocide in debates about the relationship between history and international law. It considers ways of reading archives and the role of archives in informing those debates. It compares the Istanbul war crimes trials held in 1919–1920 before the Ottoman Military Tribunals with the Paris session of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal held in 1984 that dealt with questions of history and memory through the juridical format of a hearing. A century after the events of 1915, the contested historiography of the Armenian genocide influences how international lawyers and historians seek to pass judgment on the past.

Armenian karmir “red” has often been considered as deriving from East Iranian, thus speaking in favour of relations between Armenian and Sogdian, a Middle Iranian language spoken at considerable distance from Armenia. For the origin of Hebrew karmīl, on the other hand, a Middle Persian “karmīr” has been suggested. In either case, the etymology would be Proto-Indo-European *ku̯ṛ́mi- “worm” (be it directly or as a borrowing from Sanskrit kṛ́mi-) from which the colour term would be derived in a way parallel to French vermeil “scarlet” from ver “worm”, thus a term referring to a red dye obtained from scale insects (cochineals). I argue that karmīr is not a Middle Persian word for “red”, that Sogdian is unlikely to be the source of the Armenian and Hebrew words, and that an Indian origin is not probable either because of the specific features of the Indian scale insect dye. Conversely, Armenian scarlet was widely known and appreciated already in antiquity, so that, for historical as well as linguistic reasons, the origin of the word is likely to be an Iranian language within the region where Armenian was spoken.

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.