OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In the autumn of 1834, Christopher Oscanyan, an Armenian teenager from Ottoman Constantinople, arrived in New York City to attend college. He had been sent by the first American missionaries in Turkey. His encounter with the United States initiated a sixty-year career dedicated to improving Ottoman-American relations. In order to get Americans to take him seriously, however, Oscanyan had to determine who and what he was to them – a matter that, along with his politics, would regularly change according to how both Ottomans and Americans structured and re-structured the religious, ethnic, and racial diversity of their populations. Was Oscanyan an Armenian Christian? An Ottoman reformer? A native of Turkey? An American immigrant? Tracing his efforts to serve as a connector between two empires in flux, this talk will offer a brief history of how shifting state strategies to manage diversity compelled transregional actors like Oscanyan to develop internationally legible identities – identities that still inform the way we understand ourselves and establish our place in the world.
