Armenian Genocide survivor oral history as an archival resource

Abstract

This article explores the earliest efforts to collect oral histories from Armenian Genocide survivors and examines their status as archival collections. The most significant collections were initiated by Armenian-Americans, comprising approximately over half of all recorded testimonies. A general timeline and overview of the development of these collections is provided and scrutinized to understand the breadth of the collection’s holdings and accessibility for scholarship, and the social contexts behind their creation. The article also examines the background and trajectory of oral history use in Genocide Studies, particularly within Armenian Genocide Studies, and the value it offers to the field as preservation, digitization, and accessibility become increasingly central to contemporary research. For decades, efforts to “prove” the genocide in response to Turkish denial discouraged many scholars from using Armenian sources in order to maintain a non-biased perspective. In recent years, however, genocide denial in academia and debates around the use of oral history have diminished within academia, and a growing number of scholars have begun incorporating these sources into research topics that arguably require a protagonist’s personal experience enriching and filling in gaps that traditional sources are not able to fill. The scattered nature, recent institutionalization, limited digitization, and access policies of certain oral history collections remain both a reason for their growing use and a barrier to wider accessibility.