Professors Talinn Grigor and Houri Berberian, Professor of History and Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies and the Director of the Center for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, have launched a national book tour for their new publication The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and The Making of Iranian Modernity (1860-1979) (Stanford University Press, 2025). Their first book presentation and signing took place on Mar. 6 at UC Irvine and was sponsored by UC Irvine’s Center for Armenian Studies, followed by another on Mar. 8 at the Homenetmen Glendale Arahat.

Over the next several months, Professors Grigor and Berberian will present book talks at universities and institutes throughout the U.S.

Monday, April 7: Armenian Studies at CREEES, Stanford University 

Tuesday, April 8: Hamazkayan Armenian Educational and Cultural Society, San Francisco

Wednesday, April 9: Armenian Studies, UC Berkeley

Friday, April 11: Keynote address, Armenian Studies Undergraduate Research Symposium, USC

Sunday, April 27: L.A. Times Festival of Books, USC. Iran Through Books, Booth 949

Friday, May 2: Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University

Monday, May 5: Women’s and Gender Studies Program, MIT

Friday, July 11: National Library of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia

Friday, July 18: Aslamazyan Sisters Gallery, Gyumri, Armenia

The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and The Making of Iranian Modernity (1860-1979) offers the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women’s organizations, Professors Grigor and Berberian have traced minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran’s central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patrical institutions of church and political parties. Grigor and Berberian relied of archival, textual, visual and oral history sources to challenge conventional notions of “the archive” and transformed silences and  absences into audible and visual presences.