About

Houri Berberian is a Professor of History and the Meghrouni Family Presidential Chair in Armenian Studies at UC Irvine. She serves as the Director of the Center for Armenian Studies within the School of Humanities. Her research interests encompass Modern Armenian and Middle Eastern History, with particular focus on revolution, women, and gender. Berberian holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, earned in 1997. Her scholarly work includes a range of publications such as books, essays, and edited volumes that explore Armenian history, transimperial connections, revolutionary activism, and gendered narratives within the context of Iran, the Caucasus, and the broader Middle East. She has received multiple awards and grants for her research, including the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies and the Der Mugrdechian Outstanding Book Award. Her contributions significantly advance understanding of Armenian identity, revolutionary movements, and gender dynamics in the modern Middle Eastern and Armenian historical contexts.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Art
• Law
• Gender studies
• Geology
• Paleontology
• Art history
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Literature
• Visual arts
• Ancient history
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2025-03-17 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  With this book, Houri Berberian and Talinn Grigor offer the first history of Armenian women in modern Iran. Foregrounding the work of Armenian women's organizations, the authors trace minoritarian politics and the shifting relationships among doubly minoritized Armenian female subjects, Iran's central nodes of power, and the Irano-Armenian patriarchal institutions of church and political parties. Engaging broader considerations around modernization, nationalism, and feminism, this book makes a conceptually rich contribution to how we think about the history of women and minoritized peoples. Berberian and Grigor read archival, textual, visual, and oral history sources together and against one another to challenge conventional notions of "the archive" and transform silences and absences into audible and visual presences. Understanding minoritarian politics as formulated by women through their various forms of public and intellectual activisms, this book provides a groundbreaking intervention in Iran's history of modernization, Armenian diasporic history, and Iranian and Armenian feminist historiography.

  PublisherDOI

• Shifting Relations between Armenian Political Figures and Ḥasan Taqīzādeh during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911)

  2025-07-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This study explores the incongruous relationship between Taqīzādeh, a key figure of constitutionalist struggle in Iran, and Armenian political leaders who were deeply invested in the struggle for democracy and constitutionalism in the years between 1907 and 1911. Drawing upon Armenian archives and various print material, the essay focuses on several factors that informed the shifting allegiances and even adversarial disposition of participants: (1) the interplay of shifting identities, volatile personalities, and political geographies; (2) Armenian disenchantment with unmet expectations and distrust of Iranian political leaders prejudiced by the complex relationship between Armenians and the Young Turks in neighboring Ottoman Empire; and, (3) intracommunal and intraparty disagreements that characterized the precarious Armenian and Iranian political context during this period.

  PublisherDOI

• 12 ‘We became plucked’: Reza Shah’s Education Policy and the Armenian Community of Iran

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-03-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Pictorial Modernity and the Armenian Women of Iran – CORRIGENDUM

  Iranian Studies · 2024-10-01

  erratumOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pictorial Modernity and the Armenian Women of Iran

  Iranian Studies · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract The essay explores the entangled relationship between modernization and women's visibility and representation through three pictorial spheres most redolent of that relationship: photo studio culture (1880s–1930s), satirical cartoons (1920–58), and costume exhibition (1972–76). The study prioritizes minoritarian politics formulated by women through their organizations and public activities, whether charitable in the late nineteenth century, educational in the early twentieth century, or “civilizational” from the mid-twentieth century on. By examining pictorial and textual sources, it proposes that the Armenian woman as a discursive phenomenon was central to Iran's mainstream modernization and foregrounds the complex working of a double marginality to the processes, strategies, and anxieties of late Qajar and Pahlavi modernization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 2 Gendered Narratives of Transgressive Politics: Recovering Revolutionary Rubina

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• Gendered Narratives of Transgressive Politics: Recovering Revolutionary Rubina

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021-06-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A report issued by the Ottoman commission investigating the 1905 attempted assassination of Sultan Abdülhamid II describes Rubina (Sophie Areshian), who helped plan and carry out this act of political violence, as “Armenian, originally from the Caucasus, 32 years old, hysterical, not tall, skinny, brown, large dark eyes, vague look, pronounced and hooked nose, thin bloodless lips...” Similar depictions of Rubina as prone to nervousness, easily roused and distressed are echoed in contemporary Armenian-language accounts by her male comrades. Some even attempted to blame her for the failed assassination, citing the unsuitability of her “crisis”-prone character. This chapter attempts to recover Rubina from obscurity within the context of a male-dominated revolutionary discourse through an exploration of published and unpublished documents and correspondence and predominantly nationalist narratives of her role. Rubina's act of political violence in a masculinist-nationalist setting may be viewed as a transgressive and challenging act that has been depicted in gendered terms. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to recover and insert Rubina's story into the larger Armenian revolutionary narrative as well as the broader context of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century revolutionary terror, a predominantly masculine world of revolution, and an age of rogues.

  PublisherDOI

• Notes on Contributors

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Psychology
  DOI

• Roving Revolutionaries

  2019-04-16

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds

  2019-04-16 · 25 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Three of the formative revolutions that shook the early twentieth-century world occurred almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other. Though the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions all exploded between 1904 and 1911, they have never been studied through their linkages until now. Roving Revolutionaries probes the interconnected aspects of these three revolutions through the involvement of the Armenian revolutionaries-minorities in all of these empires-whose movements and participation within and across frontiers tell us a great deal about the global transformations that were taking shape. Exploring the geographical and ideological boundary crossings that occurred, Houri Berberian's archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and print tells the story of peoples and ideologies in upheaval and collaborating with each other, and in so doing it illuminates our understanding of revolutions and movements

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sebouh David Aslanian

  1 shared

• Talinn Grigor

  University of California, Davis

  1 shared

• Leslie Knox

  1 shared

• Carole Hillenbrand

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studi…
• Der Mugrdechian Outstanding Book Award 2019
• CESS Book Award (History and Humanities) Shortlist 2020