Charles K. and Elizabeth M. Kenosian Professor of History

Armenian history

Simon Payaslian is Holder of the Charles K. and Elizabeth M. Kenosian Chair in Modern Armenian History and Literature at Boston University.

His publications include The Political Economy of Human Rights in Armenia: Authoritarianism and Democracy in a Former Soviet Republic (2011); The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present (2007); United States Policy toward the Armenian Question and the Armenian Genocide (2005); The Armenian Genocide, 1915-1923: A Handbook for Students and Teachers (2001); International Political Economy: Conflict and Cooperation in the Global System (co-authored with Frederic S. Pearson) (1999; Chinese translation, Peking University Press, 2006); and U.S. Foreign Economic and Military Aid: The Reagan and Bush Administrations (1996). He has co-edited (with Richard G. Hovannisian) two volumes, Armenian Constantinople (2010) and Armenian Cilicia (2008).

Professor Payaslian is the author of several book chapters, including “Imagining Armenia,” in The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present, edited by Allon Gal, Athena S. Leoussi, and Anthony D. Smith (2010). He has published articles on U.S. foreign policy, international human rights, the United Nations and the developing nations, the Kurdish question, and Armenian literature—for example, “Diasporan Subalternities: The Armenian Community in Syria,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (2007/2012), and “Hovhannes Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, and the Memory of the Armenian Genocide,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies (2007).

His current research projects include the history of the Armenian community in the United States; the Armenian poet Daniel Varujan in Ghent, Belgium; Armenian foreign policy since independence from the Soviet Union; and the role of American missionaries in Ottoman Armenia.

Curriculum Vitae