Sebouh David Aslanian, professor and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, University of California, Los Angeles: "Early Modernity and Mobility: Port Cities and Printers Across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800" (Lecture)

Early Modernity and Mobility (Yale UP, 2023) explores the disparate yet connected histories of Armenian printing establishments in early modern Europe and Asia. From 1512, when the first Armenian printed codex appeared in Venice, to the end of the early modern period in 1800, Armenian presses operated in nineteen locations across the Armenian diaspora.  Drawing on extensive archival research, Sebouh David Aslanian explores why certain books were published at certain times, how books were sold across the diaspora, who read them, and how the printed word helped fashion a new collective identity for early modern Armenians. In examining the Armenian print tradition Aslanian tells a larger story about the making of the diaspora itself.

The speaker is the author of From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (2011) and has published in many leading scholarly journals.