"They can live in the desert but nowhere else", Ronald G. Suny

This is an Archive of a Past Event

In his lecture, Professor Ronald Suny will explore the question “why genocide” and explains the elements that led the Young Turks to carry out the systematic deportation and massacre of hundreds of thousands of their Armenian and Assyrian subjects.

Suny is professor emeritus of political science and history at the University of Chicago. The grandson of the composer and ethnomusicologist Grikor Mirzoyan Suni and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University, he taught at Oberlin College (1968–1981), as visiting professor of history at the University of California, Irvine (1987), and Stanford University (1995–1996). He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan (1981–1995), where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program.

"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide is now available through The Princeton Press.

Professor Suny has served as chairman of the Society for Armenian Studies and on the editorial boards of Slavic Review, International Labor and Working-Class History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, The Armenian Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, and Armenian Forum, and is a contributing editor to Armenian International Magazine. He has appeared numerous times on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, CBS Evening News, CNN, and National Public Radio, and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, New Left Review, Dissent, and other newspapers and journals.