Professor Watenpaugh to give talk on Heritage, Memory and Captive Sites

Professor Heghnar Watenpaugh will give a public lecture on "Captive Sites: Official Heritage and Armenian Memory in Turkey" at UCLA in the Weds Talk series sponsored by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. 

How can we think critically about minoritization in relation to official processes of heritage-making? Is the culture of the minoritized community included in the official state heritage, is it excluded, erased or appropriated? What are the implications for the cultural heritage sector in general, and for specific sites in particular? The history and cultural heritage of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey over the course of the 20th century shed light on the long-term impacts of genocide, minoritization, and state power. During the Genocide and its aftermath, sites associated with Armenian culture, particularly religious sites, were destroyed, or repurposed, appropriated, sold or transferred. Some of them eventually became cultural heritage sites as part of state patrimony and were sundered from their connection to any remaining Armenian communities. In her public lecture, Professor Watenpaugh will present Ani, a medieval city located today on the border between Armenia and Turkey and which was listed on the UNESCO world heritage list in 2016, as a case study to address these questions.

Over the 2026-2027 academic year, Professor Watenpaugh will continue asking these questions as a Getty Residential Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. At the Getty, she will research for her next book which aims to examine how violent pasts are presented or suppressed in cultural heritage, museums and architectural preservation. 

"Captive Sites: Official Heritage and Armenian Memory in Turkey" will be held on Wednesday, Oct. 21 from 12-1 p.m. at Fowler A222, University of California, Los Angeles. The lecture is open to the public but will not be live-streamed.