Keith David Watenpaugh | |
---|---|
Born | |
Spouse | Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh |
Awards | Institute of International Education Centennial Medal, Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitor and Lecturer fellowship |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Human Rights, Religious Studies, Genocide |
Institutions | University of California, Davis |
Keith David Watenpaugh (born October 8, 1966) is an American academic. He is Professor of Human Rights Studies at the University of California, Davis. A leading American historian of the contemporary Middle East, human rights, and modern humanitarianism, he is an expert on the Armenian genocide and its denial, and the role of the refugee in world history. [1]
Watenpaugh is the founding director of the UC Davis Human Rights Studies Program, the first academic program of its kind in the University of California system. [2] He has been a leader of international efforts to address the needs of displaced and refugee university students and professionals, primarily those affected by the wars and civil conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. [3]
He serves on the academic advisory board of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement; [4] and is a founding steering committee member of the University Alliance for Refugees and at-Risk Migrants [5]
In addition to publishing in the American Historical Review, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Human Rights, Humanity, Social History, The Huffington Post and the Chronicle of Higher Education, [1] Watenpaugh is author of Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, and Colonialism and the Arab Middle Class . (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2006), and Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).
He is co-editor of Karnig Panian's Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2015). Panian was an Armenian Genocide child survivor who was held in the Ottoman orphanage at Antoura, Lebanon, where he was subjected to violent attempts at Turkification. [6]
Following the 2003 American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, he led the first investigation of conditions facing universities and research centers in Baghdad. His team's findings appear in "Opening Doors: Academic Conditions and Intellectual Life in Post-War Baghdad," [7] which was highly critical of early American cultural and education policies in post-invasion Iraq, especially those adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Since 2013, Watenpaugh has directed a joint University of California, Davis Global Affairs and Human Rights Studies project to assist refugee university students and scholars from the war in Syria. The project has documented how refugee higher education is neglected by traditional governmental and intergovernmental refugee agencies, and has proposed new methods and techniques for their assistance, including ways to increase their mobility. [8]
With the support of the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations (2017–2019), he directed the development and implementation of the Article 26 Backpack a digital/human tool that improves refugee academic document security and empowers better access to higher education opportunities. [9]
Watenpaugh is a recipient (2019) of the Institute of International Education Centennial Medal in recognition of his research, advocacy, and the Article 26 Backpack. [10]
He has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2013), [11] a Senior Fellow in International Peace at the United States Institute of Peace (2008–2009) [12] and has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle East Studies . [13]
In 2018 he held the Richard von Weizsäcker Distinguished Visitor and Lecturer fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin; distinguished research fellow (2018) of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at American University of Beirut; distinguished visiting professor (2016) at The Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University; and the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah (2005–2006). [14]
He has also had the Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Will Rogers and the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq fellowships; he was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow in Middle East Studies at Williams College from 1998 to 2000.
His scholarship has won multiple awards from professional organizations. His most recent book, Bread from Stones, is an Ahmanson Foundation Book in the Humanities; [15] and won honorable mention (2016) in the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association Norris & Carol Hundley Award competition. [16]
Watenpaugh is an Eagle Scout.
His wife, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, is also a historian and a professor at UC Davis. [17]
Bread From Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015)
Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Colonialism, Nationalism and the Arab Middle Class, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.)
"The League of Nations' Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920-1927," American Historical Review , 115:5, (December 2010). [18]
"Syria's Lost Generation" Chronicle of Higher Education, (June, 2013). [19]
"The Article 26 Backpack Digital Platform Empowers Refugee Students," IIE Networker (Spring 2018) [20]
"A Matter of Rights Professor shares his efforts to help refugees access higher education" University of California News [21]
"We Will Stop Here and Go No Further: Syrian University Students and Scholars in Turkey" (2014) [22]
Ottoman History Podcast, Syrian University Students and the Impacts of War (2014) [23]
Ottoman History Podcast Interview with Chris Gratien The Middle East in the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (2015) [24]
"Why Trump's Executive Order Is Wrongheaded and Reckless," Chronicle of Higher Education, (January, 2017)
"A Fragile Glasnost on the Tigris" Middle East Report 228: Fall 2003. Archived 2003-12-10 at the Wayback Machine
"Middle East Brain Drain," National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation - 11/22/2006
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
Humanitarianism is an active belief in the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional reasons. One aspect involves voluntary emergency aid overlapping with human rights advocacy, actions taken by governments, development assistance, and domestic philanthropy. Other critical issues include correlation with religious beliefs, motivation of aid between altruism and social control, market affinity, imperialism and neo-colonialism, gender and class relations, and humanitarian agencies. A practitioner is known as a humanitarian.
Assyrians are an indigenous ethnic group native to Mesopotamia, a geographical region in Western Asia. Modern Assyrians descend from their ancient counterparts, originating from the ancient indigenous Mesopotamians of Akkad and Sumer, who first developed the civilisation in northern Mesopotamia that would become Assyria in 2600 BCE. Modern Assyrians may culturally self-identify as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans for religious, geographic and tribal identification.
Zaki al-Arsuzi was a Syrian philosopher, philologist, sociologist, historian, and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement. He published several books during his lifetime, most notably The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue (1943).
The phenomenon of large-scale migration of Christians is the main reason why Christians' share of the population has been declining in many countries. Many Muslim countries have witnessed disproportionately high emigration rates among their Christian minorities for several generations. Today, most Middle Eastern people in the United States are Christians, and the majority of Arabs living outside the Arab World are Arab Christians.
Halide Edib Adıvar was a Turkish novelist, teacher, and a feminist intellectual. She was best known for her novels criticizing the low social status of Turkish women and what she saw from her observation as the lack of interest of most women in changing their situation. She was a Pan-Turkist and several of her novels advocated for the Turanism movement.
Michael M. Gunter is a professor of political science at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, Tennessee and considered an authority on the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Brendan O’Leary referred to Gunter as, "The doyen of Kurdish political studies in the United States,” while Martin van Bruinessen wrote that Gunter is "probably the most prolific of today’s scholars of Kurdish politics.” Gunter has written or edited more than 15 books on the Kurdish struggle and 2 more criticized for promoting Armenian genocide denial. Two of those books on the Kurds were among the first analyses in English in modern times of the Kurdish unrest in the Middle East. In writing his analyses, Gunter has worked directly with top Kurdish and other Middle Eastern political leaders. He received the Kurdish Human Rights Watch's “Service to the Kurds Award” in 1998. "Gunter’s analyses and writings sometimes strike readers as controversial, but he says his views are often based on information that hasn't yet been made public." He has served as the secretary-general of the EU Turkey Civic Commission (EUTCC), an NGO in Brussels that lobbies the EU parliament on behalf of the Kurds since 2009. He is a member of the Board of Advisory Editors of The Middle East Journal, The Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and The International Journal of Turkish Studies, among others.
Gürün is a town and a district of Sivas Province of Turkey. The mayor is Nami Çiftçi (MHP).
Armenian resistance included military, political, and humanitarian efforts to counter Ottoman forces and mitigate the Armenian genocide during the first World War. Early in World War I, the Ottoman Empire commenced efforts to eradicate Armenian culture and eliminate Armenian life, through acts of killing and death marches into uninhabitable deserts and mountain regions. The result was the homogenisation of the Ottoman Empire and elimination of 90% of the Armenian Ottoman population.
Amuda is a town in Al Hasakah Governorate in northeastern Syria close to the Syria–Turkey border. As a result of the ongoing civil war, Amuda is currently under the civil control of the AANES and military control of the SDF and Syrian Army.
In Turkey, racism and ethnic discrimination are present in its society and throughout its history, including institutional racism against non-Muslim and non-Sunni minorities. This appears mainly in the form of negative attitudes and actions by some people towards people who are not considered ethnically Turkic, notably Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, and peripatetic groups like Romani people,Domari, Abdals and Lom.
Syrians in Lebanon refers to the Syrian migrant workers and, more recently, to the Syrian refugees who fled to Lebanon during the Syrian Civil War. The relationship between Lebanon and Syria includes Maronite-requested aid during Lebanon's Civil War which led to a 29-year occupation of Lebanon by Syria ending in 2005. Following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, refugees began entering Lebanon in 2011. Lebanon's response towards the influx of refugees has been criticized as negative, with the Lebanese government leaving them undocumented and limited and attacks on Syrian refugees by Lebanese citizens which go unaddressed by authorities. Despite the strained relationship between the Syrians and Lebanese, taking into consideration only Syrian refugees, Lebanon has the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, with one refugee per four nationals. The power dynamic and position of Syria and Lebanon changed drastically in such a short amount of time, it is inevitable that sentiments and prejudices prevailed despite progressions and changes in circumstance.
Goodbye, Antoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide is a memoir written by Karnig Panian, and published in English by the Stanford University Press in 2015. The memoir, originally written in Armenian, follows the five-year-old Karnig Panian through the years of the Armenian genocide, through Anatolia and Syria, and finally to the College St. Joseph in Antoura, Lebanon, where the Ottoman Government had established an orphanage to Turkify surviving Armenian children.
"They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide is a book by Ronald Grigor Suny about the Armenian genocide, published by Princeton University Press in 2015. The book was praised as an accessible work that provides the academic consensus on why and how the Armenian genocide occurred.
The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide is a 2006 book by Guenter Lewy about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. In the book, Lewy argues that the high death toll among Ottoman Armenians was a byproduct of the conditions of the marches and on sporadic attacks rather than a planned attempt to exterminate them.
The Syrian–Mount Lebanon Relief Committee was an organization "formed in June of 1916 under the chairmanship of Najib Maalouf and the Assistant Chairmanship of Ameen Rihani" in the United States. Kahlil Gibran was its secretary. Its offices were at 55 Broadway, New York. It aimed at working in cooperation with the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, and raised "some $165,815 in two and a half years from about 15,000 Syrian subscribers in America."
The Assyrian Policy Institute (API) is a non-governmental and nonprofit organization based in the United States that primarily advocates for the rights of Assyrians and other minorities in the Middle East including Yazidis and Mandaeans.
Bibliography of the Armenian genocide is a list of books about the Armenian genocide:
Following the Armenian genocide, vorpahavak was the organized effort to "reclaim" women and children who had been abducted and forcibly converted to Islam during the genocide.
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is an American historian. A native of Lebanon, she specializes in Middle Eastern visual culture and wrote the books The Image of an Ottoman City (2004) and The Missing Pages (2019). She is also Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis.
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