Dr. Asya Darbinyan is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, where she offers courses on Genocide and Women, the Armenian Genocide, the History of Armenia, and the History of Genocide. She earned her Ph.D. in History at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark, under the direction of Prof. Taner Akçam. Her dissertation explores the Russian Empire’s responses to the Armenian Genocide and to the refugee crisis at the Caucasus battlefront of the First World War.
Dr. Darbinyan’s research and teaching expertise stand at the intersection of Armenian history, the history of the Russian Empire, genocide, refugees, and humanitarian interventions, with a focus on the agency and actions of refugees in addressing their suffering and plight. Her book chapter “Humanitarian Crisis at the Ottoman-Russian Border: Russian Imperial Responses to Armenian Refugees of War and Genocide, 1914-15” appeared in the edited volume Aid to Armenia: Humanitarianism and Intervention from the 1890s to the present (by Manchester University Press) in September 2020. Her article “Recovering the Voices of Armenian Refugees in Transcaucasia: Accounts of Suffering and Survival,” appeared in the Fall-Winter 2020 issue of the Armenian Review. She is a recipient of multiple scholarships and grants: most recently, the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative’s Vartan Gregorian Scholarship to revise and expand her dissertation into a book manuscript.
Before joining Clark University, Dr. Darbinyan was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University (NAU), a Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University, and the Deputy Director of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute in Yerevan, Armenia.