Dr. Naira Sahakyan

I am an Associate Professor of History and the Coordinator of the Armenian History course at the American University of Armenia (AUA). My research focuses on ethnoreligious nationalism, revolutions and and political discourses in the Caucasus and the Middle East. I earned my PhD in Humanities from the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and a Master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Yerevan State University (Armenia). I have served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge (2022–2023), a library-affiliated scholar at the University of Illinois (2022–2024), and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington (2018). I am the author of Muslim Reformers and the Bolsheviks: The Case of Daghestan (Routledge, 2022), Armenian Price of Peace: The Revolutions of 1917 and the Future of Armenia in the Perception of the Armenian Intelligentsia (Newmag, 2023, in Armenian) and co-author of the forthcoming Witness to Upheaval (Lockwood Press, 2027). My current book, Nationalism, Socialism, and Armenian Intellectuals in the South Caucasus during the 1917 Russian Revolution, is under contract with Amsterdam University Press (CEU Press imprint). My work explores revolutionary upheavals and the transformation of ethnoreligious nationalisms in the Caucasus. My current book project, preliminary titled Embers of Empire, Fires of Nation: Nationalism, Socialism, and Armenian Intellectuals in the South Caucasus during the 1917 Russian Revolution, examines the intersections of nationalism, socialism, state formation, and transnational intellectual history in the region.