Professor Grigor awarded the Sona Aronian Book Prize

Professor Talinn Grigor and co-author Professor Houri Berberian have received the 2026 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) for their book The Armenian Woman: Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860-1979 (Stanford University Press). 

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.