Elyse Semerdjian is the Robert Aram and Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. A specialist in the history of the Ottoman Empire, especially Ottoman Aleppo and the Armenian community, she authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) as well as several articles on gender, Ottoman Armenians, urban history, and law in the Ottoman Empire.

Semerdjian received her M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and her Ph.D. in History from Georgetown University. Her dissertation earned both distinction from Georgetown University and the Syrian Studies Association Best Dissertation Prize in 2003. Semerdjian has received two Fulbright scholarships to fund her research in Syria. She continues to write about the city and its social history, lately focusing on the Armenians of Saliba Judayda, the city’s Christian quarter, during the formative sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Her article “Naked Anxiety: Bathhouses, Nudity, and Muslim/non-Muslim Relations in Eighteenth-Century Aleppo” was published in the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and won the Syrian Studies Association Best Article Prize in 2014. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and on the board of the Syrian Studies Association. Recently, she finished a five-year term as book review editor for the International Journal of Middle East Studies and joined the editorial board of the Journal for the Society of Armenian Studies.  In the Spring of 2013, she was selected as the Dumanian Visiting Professor in Armenian Studies in The Department of Near Eastern Cultures and Languages at the University of Chicago. In 2016, she was awarded a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellowship on the subject of “Skin” to support the writing of Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023). In 2022, she received German Research Grant with the “Religion and Urbanity” Research Group at University of Erfurt, Germany, to support work two new research projects on Aleppo, the first of which will be the long-planned dream of writing the history of Aleppo’s Armenian community from Ottoman rule to the present.