Gayane Ayvazyan

Gayane Ayvazyan

PhD Candidate in History and Middle East Studies
Gayane Ayvazyan

Gayane Ayvazyan entered the Joint PhD Program in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2021. At Harvard, her aim is to analyze and explain the transformations of the interconnected networks and organization of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Tsarist Russia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is interested in both the mutual arrangement of Armenian political projects and currents, their ideological-cultural base, and the extent to which they were influenced by, and adhered to, the imperial policies of their time. Such research will, in turn, allow to study the imperial policies towards subject nations, and in particular, how those policies were manifested on the frontiers of the empires and what role the Armenians played in strengthening and weakening those frontiers. Gayane plans to conduct the study of these historic processes through the prism of the processes of primitive accumulation of capital. Gayane holds her BA and MA degrees from Yerevan State University. She received her first PhD degree from the Institute of History of NAS RA in 2014. She wrote a dissertation on the work of the Turkish Armenian intellectual Eremia Komurjian. Before beginning her graduate work at Harvard, Gayane worked as a researcher at the Institute of Ancient Manuscripts Matenadaran. As a visiting scholar she worked at Graz, Bilkent, Louvaine Catholic, Thessaloniki Hellenic, Blagoevgrad Neofit Rilski universities. Gayane participated in a number of conferences and research projects.

Contact Information

Research by Region

Research by Field