PhD and a Cup of Tea: British Representations of the Armenian Genocide and the Role of Gender

This event was organised as part of the Genocidal Captivity exhibition events series.
During the First World War the authorities of the Ottoman Empire headed by the Committee of Union and Progress carried out a policy of genocide against the empire’s Armenian minority population. This presentation will examine the interaction between British politicians, writers and national and local newspapers as they dealt with this subject at a time when the divisions between the civilian and military spheres during ‘Total War’ were being eroded. As this unfolded there was a growing acceptance of this erosion at the same time as a mounting condemnation of the process.
It will demonstrate that a polemical and listing ‘literature of denunciation’ of carefully described acts of atrocity (‘atrocitarian’), often on an individual level, underwent significant change. It was supplemented with one involving criterion-driven descriptions of staged and facilitating acts of the mass killing of civilians as groups rather than individuals. In short these were descriptions of a process of systematic extermination.
These representations demonstrated a growing awareness of how an ethnic or religious group could be taken to pieces and partially or completely destroyed. This was also closely linked to an apparent understanding of how geographical areas could be statistically altered in terms of population and homogenised. The tropes mobilised in these representations used biomedical language and concepts, and often referred to a rural idyll. Moreover, these representations often mirrored to an extent the language and rationales of the perpetrators themselves.
To tie in with the Library’s current ‘Genocidal Captivity’ exhibition which focuses on the experiences of Armenian and Yezidi women facing genocide in 1915 and 2014, this presentation will concentrate on how much of this discourse was highly gendered. It will demonstrate how the increasingly analytical descriptions of a process of extermination contained within them an awareness of the importance of stages of persecution that were directed firstly against men, and then women and children. Furthermore, an understanding of the particular role of women within the structure of an ethnic group and how an attack on them facilitated its destruction, in whole or in part.
About the Speaker
Dr Peter Morgan studied history at the University of Leeds between 1986 and 1989 before working as a history teacher in secondary schools for 21 years. Since 2010 he became increasingly involved in Holocaust education. He left the teaching profession in 2015 to research and write a doctoral thesis on British Representations of the Armenian Genocide 1915-23 at the University of Brighton.
Routledge has included a chapter on this work in a collection on Communication in the First World War (2020) and is planning to publish a monograph later this year or next. He has recently started work as an education officer at the Wiener Holocaust Library.