This graduate student is available to deliver lectures to your K-12 classroom at no charge. All requests MUST be booked through the Middle East Center Speaker's Bureau.
Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is a feminist scholar and part-time literary translator, currently pursuing her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from New York, she studied literature and creative nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College, and has since called Armenia, Italy, and Turkey home. She’s worked previously as an ESL instructor (K-12) and university lecturer, and still continues her work as a freelance editor and project consultant for exhibitions, screenplays and academic articles. She received MAs in Middle Eastern and Armenian Studies from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari in Venice, Italy (2014) and in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey (2016). Her articles and translations have appeared in Words Without Borders, Asymptote, The Armenian Weekly, The Armenian Review, Armenia: Imprints of a Civilization, Critical Approaches to Armenian Identity in the 21st Century: Fragility, Resilience and Transformation (in Turkish translation), Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (forthcoming 2021, Routledge) and ASAP/Journal: Special Issue on Autotheory (forthcoming 2021). In 2019, she co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective.
Deanna’s current research focuses on coalitions and contestations among dissident and minoritarian subjects in the Armenian and Turkish contexts that critique and deterritorialize identity and border formations through activism and cultural productions. Framing such multi-genre productions as “counter-archives,” she seeks to imagine and construct a canon of alternative archives that challenge reproductive, normative representations of (ethnosexual) belongings, kinships and lands beyond neo-liberal and hyper-individualized frames. Working in the geographic territory of the Armenia, Turkey and their diasporas, Deanna’s work sits at the intersection of critical theory, postcolonialism, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and theories of the nation, translation, and the archive. In addition to her theoretical work, she is co-writing a book and performance project with an Istanbul-based architect on the legacies of shared family trauma and redactive methods of archiving, seeking to unfix hegemonic, patriarchal architectures of histories and geographies.