Worcester’s Clark University has named Elyse Semerdjian as the next Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Modern Armenian History and Genocide at its Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
Semerdjian will assume the position in fall 2024. She currently serves as a professor of Islamic World/Middle Eastern history and chair of the History Department at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, according to a Friday press release from Clark University.
She replaces Taner Akçam, who joined the university in 2008. Akçam left the position to become the inaugural director of the UCLA’s Armenian Genocide Research Program.
This professorship is named after wife and husband Marian and Stephen Mugar, the founder of the Star Market grocery store chain and son of Armenian parents; as well as wife and husband Mariane and Robert Aram Kaloosdian, a Clark alumnus who authored a book about the Armenian genocide and whose father survived that genocide.
