Congratulations to Nanor Kebranian on successfully receiving a Principal Investigator Project award from the FWF! Her four-year project will be hosted in our department. 

Writing Against the Law: Ottoman-Armenian Print Culture (1857-1914)

This research project initiates the first study assessing the relationship between Ottoman politics and the development of dissident print culture in a non-Muslim Ottoman community between the advent of press laws (1857) and the onset of the First World War (1914). Focusing on the Ottoman-Armenian context, it addresses the linguistic, literary, and imaginal techniques mobilized by this community’s social, political, cultural, and literary actors to discursively and performatively resist imperial restrictions on public discourse and to contest ethno-confessionally defined socio-cultural divisions.

Nanor Kebranian is a researcher, writer, and translator working at the intersection of history, literature, and law. She received her doctorate from Oxford University with fellowships from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Oxford’s Clarendon Fund. Most recently, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna (2023 – 2024), and she has held research positions at various universities in the US, UK, and Singapore.