Unfortunately, and due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

Embattled Dreamlands explores the complex relationship between competing national myths, imagined boundaries and local memories in the threefold-contested geography referred to as Eastern Turkey, Western Armenia or Northern Kurdistan.

Spatially rooted in the shatter zone of the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space, it sheds light on the multi-layered memory landscape of the Lake Van region in Southeastern Turkey where collective violence stretches back from the Armenian Genocide to the Kurdish conflict of today. Based on his fieldwork in Turkey and Armenia, the author examines how states work to construct and monopolize collective memory by narrating, silencing, mapping, and performing the past, and how these narratives might help to contribute and resolve present-day conflicts. "Embattled Dreamlands" provides a unique insight into the development of national identity which will provide a great resource to students and researchers in sociology and history alike.

David Leupold is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. He was the 2018-19 Manoogian postdoctoral fellow with the Armenian Studies Program, U-M. He holds a doctoral degree from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Based on his doctoral research on contested landscapes of memory, Dr. Leupold's first monograph “Embattled Dreamlands – The Politics of Contesting Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish Memory” is in print with Routledge. He is fluent in German (native), English, Russian, Armenian, Turkish and Farsi. His field of research encompasses the politics of memory, mnemonic landscapes and counter-narratives in the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet space.

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