Early Career Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

April–September 2025

Displaced Memories: Armenian Auto-Narratives from Constantinople to the Megapolises

In this research project, Tigran Amiryan combines his interests in cultural anthropology and literature to explore how Armenian authors narrate cities and urban environments in their autobiographical and autofictional works. The project aims to highlight important cities in Armenian culture through the lens of literature, focusing on how urban spaces are remembered and represented.

An important aspect of the project is the examination of memory and post-memory – specifically, how certain cities emerge as sites of memory for authors and how these recollections shape cultural narratives. The project also engages with topics of migration and displacement, analysing the reflections of political events and forced migration in literary works, as well as the potential of autobiographical prose to document these experiences.

Armenian literature has historically evolved across various cities, forming cultural hubs in different linguistic, social and political contexts. Cities such as Paris, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Beirut and Aleppo have played a crucial role in this process. As part of the project, Amiryan will examine literary representations of these urban landscapes, with a particular focus on autobiographical prose from the second half of the 20th century to contemporary literature.

In this phase of the research, Amiryan will focus on three authors who have depicted the city as a locus of memory or loss: Krikor Beledian (Beirut), Saghatel Basil (Aleppo) and Aram Pachyan (Yerevan). Their works provide valuable insights into the ways cities are remembered, envisioned and reconstructed within Armenian literary narratives.

Dr. Tigran Amiryan is the founder of the Cultural & Social Narratives Laboratory (CSN Lab) in Armenia, an expert in ifa's Research Programme "Culture and Foreign Policy" and a member of PEN Armenia. He holds a PhD in World Literature and specialises in semiology and contemporary cultural research. Amiryan has authored numerous books and articles on memory studies, comparative literature and the sociology of literature. His research interests include the narrativisation of individual and collective memory in contemporary culture, as well as the intersections of urban memory, migration, democratic memory and cultural policies.

Amiryan has explored literary genres such as conspiracy fiction, crime fiction, autofiction and autobiographical novels, focusing on the interplay between documentary and fiction and the connections between historical discourse and personal and collective memory. He has also published works in cultural and social anthropology, examining collective and individual memory in the contexts of coexistence, migration and exile. Many of Amiryan's projects address issues related to the memory of place and cultural heritage. He has been a visiting lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at institutions such as the University of Lyon 2, Sciences Po and Humboldt University.