Helen Makhdoumian

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Collaborative Humanities
Global Humanities Thematic Research Cluster

I focus on aesthetic representations of colonial violence and its legacies in two regions: North America and the Middle East. To that end, I employ practices of relational thinking. That is, I theorize witnessing events of colonial violence and witnessing the structures which remain afterwards by juxtaposing diverse literary canons and taking up interdisciplinary scholarship. At stake in my manner of knowledge production is rupturing resilient area studies silos that prevent us from seeing commonalities refracted across different places. A full list of my publications can be found here, recordings of my recent public lectures can be found here and here, and a newsletter feature about what I am up to at Vanderbilt University can be found here.

As a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program Fellow, I am working on two projects. First, After-Words of Removal: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Literary Witnessing is a book project of literary history and theory. I illuminate how descendants of the dispossessed turn to literary production to bring to public consciousness the legacies of Indigenous removal in disparate geographies: Native North America, Palestine, and Armenia. The commonalities I reveal cover both content and form. In my analysis and interpretation of contemporary literary texts, I attend to depictions of removal from land, from kinship networks, from national imaginary, and from futurity. I treat the American Indian, First Nations, Palestinian American, and Armenian American authors whose works I take up as theorists who occupy the position of witness to the legacies of removal in their respective community’s cases. I also give name to these authors’ reliance on nested narratives. I call that repeated narrative form “nested memory.” I then use my theory of nested memory to explore a thematic after-word in each body chapter. By thematic after-word, I mean what these authors have taught readers all along to see about the reverberations of removal history both for the nation-state and for these diasporic communities.

My ways of worlding American studies inform my second book project, Parallel Lives: The Making of the American Nation Through Distant Witnessing. I use the notion of parallel lives to reveal how narratives of witnessing trauma but at a physical remove have undergirded American literary and print culture production. Once again drawing on Indigenous and diasporic texts, I show how the forms, objects, and spaces of mediation define the United States as a transnational space of encounter among and between Natives, settlers, and diasporic Others.

I take up and model relational thinking in my pedagogy, too. Many of my courses feature juxtapositions of Indigenous, diasporic, American, and Anglophone literatures. I often integrate print culture items, historical documents, art, or oral histories, among other cultural artifacts for analysis. Students thus read and interpret different cultural objects in relation. This year, I am teaching contemporary Native American literature (fall) and co-teaching a comparative, interdisciplinary genocide studies course (spring).