Hybrid lecture by Melissa Bilal, the Promise Professor in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture at UCLA, as part of the Promise Armenian Institutes 2025 commemoration of the Armenian Genocide.

Monday, April 21, 2025
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)

This lecture focuses on Armenian feminist writer and activist Zabel Yesayan’s “Pavagan E (Enough!)” published in 1922 in Vienna’s Arek (Sun) monthly. A piece of creative non-fiction or autobiographical fiction on the First Balkan War, “Pavagan E” lends itself to a discussion of Yesayan’s standpoint with regard to peace, justice, and people’s right to self-defense. In the period between autumn 1912, when Yesayan penned “Pavagan E,” and January 1922, when it came out in print, she escaped the purges against Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, spent the war years and the post-war period working on the ground to provide aid for the survivors of the Armenian Genocide, to save orphans, and to prepare eye-witness reports. This talk offers a reading of “Pavagan E” in light of Yesayan’s political activism and other writings to contextualize the text as a fundamental work in the history of Ottoman political thought.

Melissa Bilal is a sociocultural anthropologist and historian specialized in Music and Performance Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Memory Studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology and the Department of Music Performance, Education, and Composition at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music where she holds the Promise Chair in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture and serves as the director of the Armenian Music Program. Dr. Bilal's ethnographic research explores the role of music in the transmission of Armenian memory in Turkey, while her archival research is focused on the musical and intellectual history of Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Her most recent publications are the book chapter “Pavagan E (Enough!): Zabel Yesayan’s (1878–1943?) Political Thought on Peace, Justice, and People’s Right to Self-Defense” in Histories of Political Thought in the Ottoman World (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the co-authored book Feminism in Armenian: A History in Twelve Biographies and Primary Sources (Indiana University Press, Forthcoming 2026). She is currently working on a biography of pianist and composer Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967) and on her ethnography Injuries of Reconciliation: Music, Memory, and Everyday Survival of Armenians in Turkey.