Yair Auron Yair Auron is a Senior Lecturer in the field of contemporary Judaism and genocide at the Open University of Israel and the Kibbutzim College of Education. He received his Ph.D. in Contemporary Jewry in 1980 from l’Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, France, with the dissertation: “Les Mouvements de Jeunesse Juifs en France, le Judaisme Contemporaine à Travers le Miroire de sa Jeunesse.” [The Jewish Youth Movement in France - Contemporary Judaism through the Prism of Its Youth.] Dr. Auron has published numerous essays, mainly on the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish identity in Israel and Europe. He is the author, in Hebrew, of such books as Between Paris and Jerusalem (Selected Passages of Contemporary Jewish Thought in France), Jewish-Israeli Identity, Sensitivity to World Suffering: Genocide in the 20th Century and We Are All German Jews: Jewish Radicals in France During the 60s and 70s (also in French). His book The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide was published in both Hebrew and English. Auron recently presented a curriculum for an Open University of Israel, MA course named “The Pain of Knowledge: Reflections on Teaching the Holocaust and Genocide.” He is currently working on another curriculum named “Genocide,” which includes theoretical units regarding the phenomenon of genocide, as well as the analysis of case studies such as the Holocaust, the genocide of the Gypsies, the Armenian Genocide and other historical and contemporary genocides such as that of Rwanda, Tibet and the Indian population of the Americas.

Brent Beardsley Elazar Major Brent Beardsley has served 25 years in the Canadian Army in a wide range of field and headquarters positions. Highlights include operational tours in Cyprus, UN Headquarters New York and Rwanda before and during the Genocide with General Dallaire as his Canadian Staff Officer. He recently completed a tour as Chief Instructor of the CF Peace Support Training Centre and currently is a researcher at the Canadian Forces Leadership Institute at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is completing a book with General Romeo Dallaire entitled Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, which will be released by Random House in October 2003.

Frank Chalk Veteran professor Frank Chalk, of the Department of History at Concordia University in Montreal, was honoured during the sixth annual History in the Making conference in March 2000 for his “20 years of imaginative teaching.” This genocide studies specialist is co-director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies with Sociology Professor Kurt Jonassohn. Chalk is known for the support he provides to his students, as well as the boundless energy he devotes to his work. He and Jonassohn have been at the helm of a course called “The History and Sociology of Genocide,” the first of its kind in North America, and have written what is now a standard work in the field, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies

Vahakn N. Dadrian Professor Dadrian was the first Armenian scholar invited in 1995 to the British Parliament, House of Commons, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Armenian genocide; upon a second invitation, he delivered another lecture there in 2002, on the occasion of the 87th anniversary of that genocide. In 1998, through a special ceremony, he was inducted into the ranks of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. At the same time, that republic’s president decorated him with the Khorenatzi Medal, Armenia’s highest cultural award. Professor Dadrian’s field of specialization is genocide in general and the Armenian genocide in particular. He has an extensive list of publications on the subject, including several articles on the Jewish Holocaust and the victimization of the American Indians. After serving as Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York from 1970 to 1991, Professor Dadrian shifted his academic career to conducting research full-time on the Armenian genocide. For several years he was engaged as Director of a large Genocide Study Project sponsored by the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. The project’s first major achievement was the publication, now in its fourth printing, of an extensive volume titled The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (1995). This work has appeared in French (Paris, 2nd printing) and in Greek. Professor Dadrian’s other major work, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity, was published in 1996 (Cambridge, MA) and is now in its third printing. His third volume, Warrant for Genocide: The Key Elements of the Turko-Armenian Conflict, appeared in 1999. His latest book is titled The Key Elements of the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, MA, 1999). In 2002 a major article, titled, “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians as Documented by the Officials of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I Allies: Germany and Austria-Hungary” appeared in the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies. Professor Dadrian currently is Director of Genocide Research at the Zoryan Institute.

 

Hoori Hamboyan Hoori Hamboyan is studying towards an LL.B at the University of Ottawa, to be conferred in 2004. She did her Master’s thesis on refugee women in Canada. Currently, she is conducting research for Le Mouvement ontarien des femmes immigrantes francophones on the impact of armed conflict on women refugees and immigrants.

 

Richard G. Hovannisian Richard G. Hovannisian is Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1962, he has organized the undergraduate and graduate programs in Armenian and Caucasian history. In 1987, Professor Hovannisian was appointed the first holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1978 to 1995, he also served as the Associate Director of the G.E. von Grunebaum Center for Near Eastern Studies and from 1966 to 1969 was Associate Professor of History at Mount St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles. Professor Hovannisian was born in Tulare, California, received his B.A. (1954) and M.A.(1958) degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D.(1966) from UCLA. He is the author of Armenia on the Road to Independence (1967, 1969, 1974, 1982); The Republic of Armenia, Volume I (1971, 1974, 1982, 1996), and Volume II (1982, 1996), Volumes III-IV (1996); The Armenian Holocaust (1980); has edited and contributed to The Armenian Image in History and Literature (1981), The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (1986), The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (1992); The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, 2 volumes (1997); Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (1998), Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases (1999), Armenian Van/Vaspurakan (2000), Armenian Baghesh/Bitlis and Taron/Mush (2001), Armenian Tsopk/Kharpert (2002), and six books on Near Eastern society and culture, and has published more than sixty scholarly articles. Richard Hovannisian is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received many honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and advancement of Armenian Studies. Dr. Hovannisian is a founder and three-time president of the Society for Armenian Studies and represented the State of California on the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education (WICHE) from 1978 to 1994. He serves on the board of directors of nine scholarly and civic organizations, including the Facing History and Ourselves Foundation; the International Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide; International Alert; and the Foundation for Research on Armenian Architecture. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Armenian Review, Ararat, Human Rights Review, Journal for the Society for Armenian Studies, Mitk, and has made numerous television and radio appearances on issues relating to the Armenian people and Armenian, Near Eastern, and Caucasian history. In 1982, he was honored by His Holiness Karekin II of the Great House of Cilicia with the Medal of St. Mesrop Mashtots for his advancement of Armenian studies. In 1990, Richard Hovannisian was elected to the Armenian Academy of Sciences, becoming the first social scientist living abroad to be so recognized. He has received honorary doctorates from Erevan State University (1994) and Artsakh State University (1997). In 1998, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the establishment of the first Armenian republic in 1918, Hovannisian was presented the Movses Khorenatsi (primary classical Armenian historian) medal and award by the Republic of Armenia. In November, 2001, on the occasion of his 40th anniversary in the field of Armenian Studies, Dr. Hovannisian was commended by the U.S. Congress, California State Legislature, Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, Armenian Academy of Sciences, Armenian Educational Foundation, UCLA, and numerous other organizations and institutions. He received an encyclical and the medal of "Saints Sahak and Mesrop" from His Holiness Garegin II, Supreme Patriarch-Catholicos of the Armenian Church, and an encyclical and award of the "Knight of Cilicia" order from His Holiness Aram I of the Holy See of the Great House of Cilicia.

 

Jacques Kornberg Professor Jacques Kornberg graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in History, Summa Cum Laude. After service in the US Army Medical Corps Historical Unit, he received his doctorate in history from Harvard University. He taught at Stanford University, and then joined the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His chief teaching and research interests have been in Modern European Intellectual History and Modern European Jewish History. He has served as Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Toronto. A book of his published by Indiana University Press, Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism, won a U.S. National Jewish Book Award in 1994. Other publications include "Holocaust Denial and the Paranoid Style," Patterns of Prejudice (Summer, 1995), "Vienna, the 1890s: Jews in the Eyes of Their Defenders," Central European History (Fall, 1995), and "Vienna, the 1890s: The Austrian Opposition to Antisemitism," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook vol. XLI (1996). More recently he has become interested in the history of Catholic-Jewish relations. On this subject, he has published "Ignaz von Dollinger's Die Juden in Europa: A Catholic Polemic against Antisemitism," in the Zeitschrift fur Neuere Theologiegeschichte/Journal for the History of Modern Theology, (1999). He is currently engaged in a study of the controversy over Pope Pius XII and the destruction of European Jewry during World War II.

 

Robert Melson Robert Melson is a professor of political science and former acting director of the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue University. He is the current First Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He completed his BS in Mathematics and Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, and, after graduate work in Anthropology at Yale University, he received his Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT in 1967. His major area of teaching and research has been ethnic conflict and genocide. His interest in the topic derives from his family's experience in Europe, as well as from his field work in Nigeria in 1964-65, a year before the onset of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war. The story of his and his family's survival during the Holocaust is told in False Papers, (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for 2001. His book, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press, 1992), won the international PIOOM Award in Human Rights for 1993. (PIOOM is a Dutch affiliate of Amnesty International. The acronym in Dutch stands for "Interdisciplinary Program of Research on the Root Causes of Human Rights Violations.") He has published (with Howard Wolpe, eds.), Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971) and articles in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and elsewhere. Professor Melson has been a Foreign Area Fellow of the Ford Foundation (for research in Nigeria 1964-66), a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois (1969-70), Fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1983), and a Purdue University Nominee for the Lilly Foundation Open Fellowship (1995). On September 14, 2000 he testified before the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights concerning the Armenian Genocide. He has held positions as Research Associate at the Harry S. Truman Institute of the Hebrew University, as Research Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and at the Center for International Studies at MIT. He was a founder and charter member of the Association of Genocide Scholars. Currently he is a member of the board of the Armenian Genocide Archive and the Armenian National Institute. He has lectured on problems of ethnic conflict and genocide at the University of California at Los Angeles, Oxford University, the University of London, Nagoya University, MIT, Harvard University, Leiden University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Armenian Academy of Science (Erevan), Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), Colgate University, McGill University, Yale University, Slippery Rock University, Ibuka (Kigali, Rwanda), and the Hiroshima Peace Institute.

 

Roger W. Smith Roger Smith is Professor Emeritus of Government at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, where he has taught political theory and the comparative study of genocide. Prof. Smith has written extensively on the nature, language, history and denial of genocide. In addition to numerous articles, he is the editor and co-author of Guilt: Man and Society, and editor of Genocide: Essays Toward Understanding, Early-Warning, and Prevention. As past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, he has spoken extensively on the topic of genocide in the United States, Canada, France and Armenia. In 2000, Prof. Smith gave testimony before the U.S. Congress relating to the Armenian Genocide Resolution (H. Res. 596). Dr. Smith has been honoured by the Armenian Students Association with the Arthur Dadian Award for the preservation and presentation of Armenian history.

Khachig Tölölyan Khachig Tölölyan is a professor of English at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and is the author of many articles on modern narrative and critical theory. He also publishes in the fields of Armenian Studies, international terrorism, ethnicity, nationalism, trans-nationalism and diasporas. In addition to holding the position of Editor of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Professor Tölölyan also co-edits Pynchon Notes.