Tufts University to Host an Event on Armenian Genocide and Denialism

An event commemorating the Armenian Genocide will be held at the Tufts University, USA. The Tufts event will feature a lecture by Marc Mamigonian, Director of Academic Affairs at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), entitled “Scholarship and the Armenian Genocide: The State of the Art and the State of Denial.”

The lecture will offer an overview of the current state of the art in Armenian Genocide scholarship as well briefly survey the development of Armenian Genocide denial and focus on more recent refinements and the penetration of denial into American academia, with an emphasis on the fundamental challenges of denialism, debate, and the quest for intellectual integrity.

According to the organizers, the past two decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, with a significant number of important works of documentation and interpretation. At the same time, the development of ever-increasingly compelling scholarly works has been paralleled by the evolution of traditional strategies of denial. While scholars have moved beyond simplistic questions of whether or not what occurred was a genocide, like tobacco industry lobbyists of the 1950s or today’s so-called global warming skeptics, apologists for the “Turkish position” labor to construct denialism as a legitimate intellectual position within a historical debate through the publication of ostensibly scholarly publications and presentations. Such manufactured controversy is a time-tested and often effective method of means of generating academic credibility.