Dr Suzan Meryem Rosita Kalayci

I think and write about silence in history. My interest in the notion of silence arises from the work I have done on the Armenian genocide and for which I have received several awards. My first book on the topic of the Armenian Genocide is a completely empty book (2010, 2015) which is on view in several library and art collections around the world. The book represents my attempt to address the narrow and limiting scope of denial and its effects on historical scholarship in Turkey.  My forthcoming book Reading Silences: Essays on Women, Memory and War in 20th Century Turkey (under contract with Degruyter/Brill) is a unique comparison of Armenian and Turkish women’s diverse and complex historical experiences both during and after the genocide. It brings together women’s stories of martyrdom, trauma, and survival and those in which women took active part in genocidal violence.

I have brought together these two strands of my research in a collaboration with the International Armenian Literary Alliance, where we explored the role storytelling can play in imagining futures after war, and in Syria and Silence, a project funded by TORCH’s Humanities Cultural Programme.

More broadly speaking, my academic work focuses on the history of the Eastern Mediterranean with a special interest in its entanglements with the British Empire. I come to the field of British History as an outsider whose encounters with the legacies of British imperialism were my initial point of entry into it, and as an historian committed to novel forms of historical enquiry and publication. I have co-edited a volume on Ireland and Armenia entitled Daredevils of History? Resilience in Armenia and Ireland.  In this volume, we aimed to rethink the politics of mourning, victimhood, and martyrdom in contemporary and historical narratives of Armenian and Irish nationalism. We did so comparatively and with a focus on migration between Armenia and Ireland, or in shared cultural contexts.

I am currently researching a book on British humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean. The book builds on the research I conducted on two private mental health hospitals founded by British Quakers in Aleppo and Beirut as part of my British Academy postdoctoral project which highlights British religious humanitarianism in the region and the complicated questions around religion, race, and colorism it brought with it. For this research I have been given access to previously unseen documents in the national archives of Quakers in Britain and of the Wellcome Collection Archives.  

Research Interests

My research interests span women’s, gender history, and queer history (with a regional focus on the modern middle east); oral and cultural history (with a methodological focus on memory and affect); war and genocide; human rights language and humanitarianism; global religions and imperialism; slavery and race (with a regional focus on the modern middle east); Britain in the Eastern Mediterranean; British-Ottoman relations; and Quaker History in the 19th and 20th centuries (I have recently completed a postgraduate degree in Quaker studies). 

Public Engagement and Community History

Knowledge exchange, public engagement, and performative practices have been central to my work so far and I enjoy working in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaborations.

With the poet and Professor of English, Kate McLoughlin, and the Ritblat Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science, Willem Kuyken, I am leading the Silence Hub (SH). Grown from a project called “Into Silence”, a series of silent performances in an array of mediums, the Silence Hub is an inter-disciplinary and public-facing network enabling those interested in silence to come together to share ideas and experience the power of soundlessness.

As part of my work to further broaden research on the Armenian Genocide I have founded, with Professor Theo Maarten van Lint (Faculty of Oriental Studies), the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research (ONAGR).  ONAGR is the first of its kind in the UK and benefits from links and partnerships with a wide range of institutions in Oxford and beyond. Our first international partnership was with the Oral History Archives at Columbia University (OHAC). Together with OHAC, we have digitized and are now in the process of transcribing the Columbia Armenian Oral History Collection—an important, widely unknown, collection of 147 testimonies of child survivors of the Armenian genocide.