About

Sebouh Aslanian is a Professor and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at UCLA. His research focuses on the early modern world and Armenian history, with particular interest in Middle Eastern Studies. Aslanian's work explores the historical developments and cultural dynamics of the Armenian people within the broader context of the Middle East, contributing to the understanding of regional history and identity.

Research topics

• History
• Ancient history
• Political Science
• Classics
• Engineering
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Law

Selected publications

• :<i>Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters</i>

  The Journal of Modern History · 2025-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• From Mount Lebanon to the Little Mount in Madras: Mobility and Catholic-Armenian Alms-Collecting Networks During the Eighteenth Century

  2025-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Relying on heretofore untapped archival documentation stored in multiple archives, this chapter provides a “global micro-history” of a remarkably mobile Catholic Armenian alms collector named Father Andreas Ouzounean from Mount Lebanon to ask larger questions about the very nature of early modern mobility in general and about eighteenth-century religious fundraising networks in particular. The chapter follows Father Andreas's fundraising voyages from Lebanon to Moscow, Lvov, Vienna, Trieste, Rome, Malta, Istanbul, Isfahan, Baghdad, Basra, and especially to Madras and Calcutta and argues that the mobility of such itinerant men and their success as alms collectors were very much predicated on early modern “infrastructural public works projects” and the effective use of special certificates and credit instruments such as bills of exchange and respondentia loans.

  PublisherDOI

• Uneasy Partnership: A Note on Armenian-Danish Commercial Collaboration in the Indian Ocean, ca. 1700

  Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient · 2025-04-07

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The trading network of the Armenians of New Julfa expanded apace in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean in the seventeenth century, the same period when the chartered trading East India Companies of the Netherlands, England, France and Denmark were being created. While we know a fair amount regarding Armenian dealings with the English, French, and Dutch, less has been written concerning the case of the Danes. However, an exploration of Copenhagen’s Rigsarkivet sheds some intriguing light on the Armenian-Danish relationship, which was one of both violent conflict and episodic partnership. This exploratory note closely considers a commercial contract in Julfa dialect from the early eighteenth century, which sheds light on the Armenian sugar trade from Bengal and the community’s dealings with the Danes.

  PublisherDOI

• A Merchant, a Spy, an Artist, and a Viennese Coffeehouse Owner: Some Notes on an Armenian Sketchbook-Chronicle Preserved in the National Library of Austria

  Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies · 2023-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of “nouveau literacy” in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary.

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• Conclusion: Coda, or Books across Borders

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• 2. “Paper Instruments,” Social Networking, and Mobility across the Early Modern Armenian Diaspora

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Early Modernity and Mobility

  2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
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• 1. Armenians on the Move

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 5. Print and Port-to-Port Mobility

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Notes

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2023-07-27

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Frequent coauthors

• Ann McGrath

  1 shared

• Joyce E. Chaplin

  1 shared

• Vazken S. Ghougassian

  1 shared

• Guillaume Calafat

  Institut d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine

  1 shared

• Armen Haghnazarian

  1 shared

• Kristin Mann

  1 shared

• Houri Berberian

  University of California, Irvine

  1 shared