Professors Talinn Grigor and co-author Houri Berberian are the 2026 recipients of the Western Association of Women Historians’ Barbara “Penny” Kanner Award for excellence in the use of primary sources. The award acknowledges the achievements of scholars whose books, book chapters, articles, or published electronic media illustrate the effective and impressive use of a specific set of primary documents such as diaries, letters and oral histories. Grigor and Berberian’s book The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979 (Stanford Press, 2025) utilized a rich array of archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources to challenge conventional notions of “the archive” and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences.

The Armenian Woman was also named 2025 Outstanding Academic Title Award, sponsored by Choice.

Grigor and Berberian’s book provides the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women’s organizations, Grigor and Berberian 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, The Armenian Woman makes a conceptually rich contribution to how the history of women and minoritized peoples are considered. Reading primary documents from institutional and personal archives, as well as textual, visual, and oral history sources, the authors 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, their book provides a detailed intervention in Iran’s history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography