Grounded in the field of late Ottoman history this lecture will draw on the disciplines of political sociology and anthropology to challenge bottom-up narratives and relate the past of contested geographies located in the shattered zones of the post-Ottoman and the post-Soviet. Dr. Leupold will examine the relationship between biographical subjects, the politics of memory and communal boundaries in the region around Lake Van - a geography where collective violence stretches back in time to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and into the contemporaneous Kurdish conflict. The lecture will begin by reconstructing the history of competing national movements and collective violence in the late-Ottoman period, and then deconstruct official Armenian, Turkish and Kurdish accounts to juxtapose ‘official histories’ with their local counter-narratives.

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Photo caption: Yüksekova, Southeastern Turkey