About me

Naira E. Sahakyan is Assistant Professor in History at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences of the American University of Armenia, where she also coordinates the Armenian History course and serves as Interim Director of the Turpanjian Institute of Social Sciences.

She holds a PhD in Humanities from the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, written under Michael Kemper with Alfrid Bustanov and Boris Kolonitskii as co-promoters, examined Islamic politics and Muslim education in Daghestan after the Russian Revolution. It became her first book, Muslim Reformers and the Bolsheviks: The Case of Daghestan (Routledge, 2022). Before Amsterdam she studied Arabic and Islamic studies at Yerevan State University and spent a summer at the Centre of Arabic Language and Culture at Cairo University.

Her research moves between two fields. The first is the late imperial and revolutionary Caucasus: Muslim reformism, the language question and the vernacular experience of 1917 in Daghestan, and the debates of Armenian intellectuals about the future of Armenia. The second is the present-day politics of memory and enmity in the South Caucasus, above all the rhetoric that state leaders in Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey have built around the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, the University of Illinois and the University of Washington, and previously taught at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Yerevan State University and worked at the European University at Saint Petersburg. She is a member of ASEEES and BASEES.