Lerna Ekmekcioglu

Lerna Ekmekcioglu is a historian of the modern Middle East with a focus on the late Ottoman Empire, post-genocide Turkey, and minority politics. Her research explores how Armenians—particularly women—navigated survival and belonging after empire and mass violence. She is the author of Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey and co-author of Feminism in Armenian, a historical archive of Armenian feminist thought from the 1860s to 1960s. Her teaching includes courses on genocide and its aftermath, women and gender in the Middle East, and the global history of abortion. Prof. Ekmekcioglu is the winner of the 2016 Levitan Teaching Award in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and organizes the Bi-annual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women in the developing world.

Her first book, Bir Adalet Feryadı, Osmanlı’dan Cumhuriyet’e Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar (1862–1933) [A Cry for Justice: Five Armenian Feminist Writers from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (1862–1933)], is a co-edited volume published in Turkish in 2006. Her first monograph, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2016), is the winner of Der Mugrdechian Society for Armenian Studies Outstanding Book Award. Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide from the perspective of survivors who remained in Turkey. In 2022, Prof. Ekmekcioglu wrote an extensive introduction for the Western Armenian publication of the WWI prison memoirs of Vartouhie Calantar (-Nalbandian, Zarevand) one of the Ottoman Armenian (later, American) feminists she studies. The book is now fully translated to Turkish (Hapishane-i Umumi Kadınlar Koğuşu) .She also wrote an article in English about Calantar in Documenting the Armenian Genocide. Prof.Ekmekcioglu’s latest article, published in They All Made Peace – What is Peace?: The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (Gingko, 2023), is about the Armenian political demands for autonomy within Turkey at the 1922–23 Lausanne Conference. Her work on communist feminist Armenian women in Paris after WWI appeared in 2024 in Études arméniennes contemporaines.

Prof. Ekmekcioglu’s next book, co-authored with Prof. Melissa Bilal (UCLA), will come out from Indiana University Press in June 2026. Titled Feminism in Armenian: Lives and Texts through Empire, Genocide, and Diaspora, the volume focuses on twelve writer-activists (their biographies and selected works) to trace and theorize a century of Armenian feminist thought and activism through an intergenerational, intertextual, and transimperial lens from the 1860s to the 1960s. 

Podcasts

“Women and Genocide: Insights from the Armenian Genocide,” interview with Dr. Dilar Dirlik for Women and War: A Feminist Podcast, University of Oxford, Refugee Studies Center, 07/1/2022

“The Epitome of Loss,” interview with Dr. Ozan Ozavci, The Lausanne Project Podcast, 06/03/2022​

Videos

Lerna Ekmekcioglu: The Political Mademoiselle of the Women’s Ward: Vartouhie Calantar-Nalbandian

Paging through Photos and Songs: H. Mark and K. Ghazarosian’s Friendship in Post-Genocide Istanbul

Articles

For Lerna Ekmekcioglu’s articles, see her academia page :https://mit.academia.edu/LernaEkmekcioglu