In December 2005, during the final phase of the systematic erasure of Armenian material memories in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan’s military flattened Djulfa, the world’s largest cemetery of khachkar stelae. Drawing on two decades of research, Dr Simon Maghakyan unveils a new theoretical framework for explaining the human impulse to manage disquieting heritage, exploring past-proofing policies that range from erasure to embrace.

Dr Simon Maghakyan is an Associate Faculty Member and 2024-2025 Gulbenkian Postdoctoral Fellow with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, specialising in the emerging interdisciplinary field of heritage and security. His collaborative investigative exposés have been praised as “groundbreaking” by Forbes and “rock-solid” by The Guardian, and informed discussions at the U.N. Security Council and the International Court of Justice. His research and analyses on conflict and the material past have appeared internationally, including in The Art Newspaper, BBC, Foreign Policy, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Time magazine. He is the founding co-editor, with Dirk Moses and Laurajane Smith, of a forthcoming handbook on heritage and security. His inaugural book, Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past, a theoretical element in critical heritage studies, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

The event will start at 18:00 with a drinks reception, the lecture will commence at 19:00 and will end, after a period of Q&A, at around 20:30.