Heghnar Watenpaugh

Heghnar Watenpaugh is Ph.D. in Art History, specialization in the art, architecture, and urbanism of the Middle East, and professor at the University of California, Davis. She has a special interest in cultural heritage and museum studies. R research supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the President of the University of California. Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.

She has served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the Syrian Studies Association, and is currently the President of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus.

The project

Title: Cultural Heritage and Genocide - Chair of Excellence for 2026

"My current research extends to the themes of intentional destruction of culture, questions of restitution, and struggles over cultural memory. I seek to highlight specific objects or buildings and individual voices while remaining attentive to the multiple and layered contexts in which they are produced. The aea of my research is the cultural heritage of Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire that were destroyed during and after the genocide."

Hosting institution: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO)

Selective Bibliography

• The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
• “A History of Cultural Heritage in Aleppo: A Contested Terrain,” in Reconstruction as Violence in Syria, edited by Nasser Rabbat and Deen Sharp (American University in Cairo Press, 2025).
• “Islamic City, Colonial City, Refugee City: Urban Histories of Aleppo During the French Mandate,” in On Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Contemporary Middle East, Edited by Susan Slyomovics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 107-130.
• “Provenance: Genocide. The Transfer of Armenian Sacred Objects to Art Collections,” in Variant Scholarship: Ancient Texts in Modern Contexts, Edited by Neil Brodie, Morag M. Kersel and Josephine M. Rasmussen (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2023). 219-234.