Pembroke JRF Publishes Essay Marking the 111th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

On the occasion of the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Pembroke JRF Dr Susan Meryem Rosita Kalayci has written an essay reflecting on the role historians play in shaping narratives of violence. The essay, titled 'Genocide is a Verb', focuses on how harm persists beyond events themselves—through language, archives, and forms of social and embodied memory. You can read the essay here.

Dr Kalayci is the co-founder and co-lead of the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research (ONAGR), which she established at Pembroke College together with fellow Pembrokian Professor Theo Maarten van Lint, Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies, just days before the global pandemic hit.

Since its founding, ONAGR has led a number of important initiatives, often working in a deliberately quiet and sustained way. These include the preservation of a previously overlooked oral history collection of 128 child survivors in New York; the publication of Armenian Genocide: A Reader’s Guide to Archival Sources at the Bodleian Libraries (available via ORA); and a programme of school workshops, most recently with Rwandan and American high school students in March 2026. 

The network has also co-developed Syria and Silence—a collaborative project with the Silence Hub featuring public programmes, a multilingual pop-up library (Maktabah), and digital storytelling curated by Syria Untold, reflecting on the ongoing war in Syria—and has more recently supported archival preservation efforts in post-Assad Syria. ONAGR has further contributed to projects on silence and archival absence, including a 2024 Bodleian display and blog feature inspired by a pop-up instantiation of the Queer Armenian Library (its first complete physical copy now held at the Bodleian Libraries). It has also received funding for Silence as Method: Collaborative and Creative Approaches to the Armenian Genocide and its Afterlives (HayCoLab & HARM), a joint Oxford–Berlin initiative bringing together scholars, artists, and activists to explore silence as both an ethical and methodological practice in the study of violence and its afterlives, taking place this May and June in Oxford and Berlin.

ONAGR contributes annually to parliamentary events at Westminster, including the recent commemoration of 125 years since the birth of Raphael Lemkin which you can watch here.

"Building on this steady foundation, we are now in a position to scale up our research through the development of the ERC project HARM: Genocide as a Verb, which has progressed to the second stage and, if successful, will enable us to expand into a broader, internationally collaborative and comparative framework," shares Dr Kalayci.