7:00 p.m.
President's Room
Coffman Memorial Union
Dr. Vahram Shemmassian is an associate professor and the director of the Armenian Studies Program at California State University, Northridge. He is the foremost scholar on Musa Dagh the site of the famed resistance during the Armenian genocide.
Professor Shemmassian will talk about the resistance and the genocide in his presentation "The Musa Dagh Resistance to the Armenian Genocide and Its Impact through Franz Werfel's Historical Novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh."
Franz Werfel (1890-1945), Austrian poet, modernist playwright, and novelist, was born in Prague, the son of a Jewish merchant. During World War I, Werfel served for several years on the Russian front as a soldier in the Austrian army. His novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh published in 1933 detailed the mass murder and expulsion of Armenians from eastern Anatolia in 1915. The novel received much attention in the United States standing as a warning against future acts of mass murder and won lasting respect from Armenian communities throughout the world.
Sponsored by: The Institute for Global Studies, Center for Austrian Studies, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, College of Liberal Arts, Critical Asian Studies, Study of the Asias.
