Ararat Şekeryan

Ararat Şekeryan is a scholar and translator specializing in the literatures and cultures of Eurasia and the Middle East. He is currently completing his doctoral degree in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His dissertation, “Russia as Woman: The Afterlives of Émigré Female Bodies in Russo-Turkish Space, 1919–39,” examines the sexualized and racialized portrayals of Russophone refugee women in Russian and Turkish literature and visual culture. Focusing on the mass displacement of White Russian refugees to Istanbul after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the dissertation explores how their presence reshaped perceptions of gender, race, and national identity during a period of profound political and cultural transition in Turkey and the Russian diaspora.
Ararat is also developing a secondary project examining how the Soviet policy of Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples) shaped late- and post-Soviet Armenian and Azerbaijani literature and cinema, focusing on the roles of Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Russian intellectuals in the Caucasus and beyond. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Ararat studied Russian and Polish at Istanbul University, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, and the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. His Turkish translation of Hagop Baronian’s Kaghakavarutyan Vnasnere (Perils of Politeness) was published by Can Yayınları in 2016 (Adabımuaşeretin Zararları, Istanbul).