
Series
Volume 4
New Directions in Turkish Studies
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Lives in Fragments
Self-Narrative Sources and Biographical Approaches to the Armenian Genocide
Edited by Eren Yıldırım Yetkin, Nazan Maksudyan and Adnan Çelik
322 pages, 20 illus., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-83695-333-3 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Not Yet Published (February 2026)
eISBN 978-1-83695-334-0 eBook Not Yet Published
Description
The lens of life stories allows us to identify contested memories and counter-narratives, thus offering new ways of interpreting the social dynamics that led to acts of genocidal violence and their remembrance, yet also to their denial. Lives in Fragments focuses on life stories that were fragmented and shattered through the historical violence of the Armenian genocide, and offers a nuanced understanding of genocide’s complex historical and social dimensions. Diverse ego-documents and self-narrative sources become subject of analysis in chapters that investigate the historiography and remembrance of the Armenian genocide. By drawing attention to biographical trajectories and manifestations, Lives in Fragments reflects on the history and memory of genocidal violence.
Eren Yıldırım Yetkin is based at the Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences, Berlin, and is an Advisory Board Member of the Research Committee 38 Biography and Society of the International Sociological Association. His publications include his doctoral thesis – Violence and Genocide in Kurdish Memory: Exploring the Remembrance of the Armenian Genocide through Life Stories (2022) – and a co-authored monograph, Jugendliche Erinnerungspraktiken: Methodenplurale Forschung zur Auseinandersetzung mit Geschichte und Gegenwart (Verlag Barbara Budric,2025).
Nazan Maksudyan is a Senior Researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, with special interest in children and youth, gender, sexuality, exile and migration, sound studies, and the history of sciences. She is the author of Türklüğü Ölçmek (2005), Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (2014), and Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (2019). She is on the Editorial Board of Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Women's History, Journal of European Studies, and First World War Studies.
Adnan Çelik is Associate Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He authored Dans l'ombre de l'État: Kurdes contre Kurdes: Une anthropologie historique des conflits intra-kurdes au Kurdistan de Turquie (2021) and co-authored La malédiction: le génocide des Arméniens dans la mémoire des Kurdes de Diyarbekir (2021) with N. K. Dinç. He also co-edited Kurds in Turkey: Ethnographies of Heterogeneous Experiences (2019) with L. Drechselová.