"Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide” (Stanford University Press 2023) has been awarded the 2025 Raphael Lemkin Book Award by the Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISGen.org).
The biennial award is for the best nonfiction work that focuses on the causes, prevention, response, or consequences of genocide and mass atrocities. The ISG is a non-profit human rights organization working for over forty years to promote and disseminate scholarship and policy analysis on the causes, consequences and prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.
The Lemkin Book Award committee, composed of an interdisciplinary group of scholars in the field of genocide and atrocities studies, read over seventy books published in 2023 and 2024 and chose Remnants for its theoretical contributions, thorough research, and originality. There will be a public event in NYC this Fall where I will accept the award from The Institute for the Study of Genocide.
Past winners of the Lemkin Book Award have included Sabine Cadeau, Alison Crosby, M. Brinton Lykes, Geoffrey Robinson, Benjamin Madley, Mark Levene, Yang Jisheng, Emma Gilligan, Darius Rejali, Donald
Bloxham, Peter Balakian, Samantha Power, and Alison Des Forges.
Review of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s Missing Pages in Critical Inquiry
An illuminated manuscript containing the Gospels rests in an archive in Yerevan, Armenia, while eight missing pages of canon tables––concordance lists of related biblical passages––are housed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Missing Pages is Heghnar Watenpaugh’s biography of a “survivor object,” the Zeytun Gospels. The dismembered manuscript is a potent metaphor for the Armenian community scattered across the earth like looted pages during a genocide campaign that began in 1915.