Hovhannisyan’s current book project, “Double Assimilations, Empty Fields, and Orphan Objects: Armenian Archival Imaginaries,” critically engages with Armenian modern-era arts and crafts that have been subjected to epistemic and colonial violence through forced displacement, archival silences, and cultural appropriations. Specifically, she explores the trans-imperial fragmentations of Eastern and Western Armenians in West Asia as manifested in their historical and contemporary displacements and erasures as Indigenous, national, refugee, and survivor subjects. Through studying the politics of archival metadata and in alliance with Black feminist, Indigenous, and global studies scholars and curators, her work imagines new historiographies of subaltern, diasporic, transnational, and trans-indigenous identities, and epistemologies.

Postdoctoral Fellowships: In 2023-24, Hovhannisyan was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual and Digital Storytelling (Carceral Connecticut Project, Wesleyan University). Notably, she was the 2022-23 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown University, and part of the seminar, “In the Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruin,” led by Professor Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman. Awards and Fellowships: In 2023, Hovhannisyan was the Recipient of the 2023 Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal for the School of Arts and Humanities, UCSD. She was also the 2019 recipient of the UC Critical Refugee Studies Collective award and often collaborates with the Center for Information as Evidence, Archives and Information Studies, UCLA.

Curatorial Projects include Archive-Practice, a collection of artifacts and interviews mapping the formation of Armenian contemporary art after the 1991 Independence from the Soviet era; the 2012— exhibition (Gyumri International Biennale, Armenia, 2012); collaborative projects and co-curatorial contributions include A Step Aside exhibition (Angle Art Contemporary gallery, Lyon Biennale, France, 2011), A Journey the East exhibition (Arsenale Gallery, Poland, 2011), and Soviet AgitArt. Restoration exhibition (BM SUMA Contemporary Art Center, Turkey, 2008). Other Research and Curatorial Fellowships include the Getty Consortium Seminar, Kadist Art Foundation, and Center for Experimental Museology, V-A-C Foundation. She has given talks at RISD, John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities & Cultural Heritage, UCLA School of Education & Information Studies; Dept. of Art and Design, Rutgers University.

Contact:m1hovhan[at]ucsd.edu
Photo: Berge Arabian, 2026