Lecture by Simon Maghakyan, Ph.D., with commentary by Professor Peter Cowe, Ph.D..

Monday, December 1, 2025
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
UCLA Bunche Hall, Room 10383

In December 2005, during the final phase of the systematic erasure of Armenian material memories in Nakhichevan, Azerbaijan’s military destroyed Djulfa, the world’s largest cemetery of khachkar stelae. Drawing on two decades of research, Dr. Maghakyan unveils a new theoretical framework for explaining the negation of disquieting material heritage in ethnoterritorial conflicts, examining the multilayered factors behind such security policies and identifying potential pathways for preempting similar outcomes in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh.

Simon Maghakyan is a political scientist specializing in the intersection of heritage and security. He is an associate member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and an incoming Visiting Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. He has previously held appointments at the University of Denver, Fresno State, and Tufts University. He earned his PhD in defense and security studies in 2024 from Cranfield University, an academic arm of the UK Ministry of Defence, after a decade in nonprofit and teaching roles, including at his alma mater, the University of Colorado Denver. His collaborative predoctoral research in Hyperallergic and The Art Newspaper used visual forensics to expose Azerbaijan’s erasure of Nakhichevan’s Armenian heritage, praised as “rock-solid” by The Guardian and cited at the International Court of Justice. His public-facing scholarship has appeared in outlets such as the BBC, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Time. His forthcoming academic publications include a co-edited handbook bridging critical heritage and security studies, and Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past (Cambridge University Press), which advances a new theoretical framework for understanding cultural genocide.

S. Peter Cowe is the Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at UCLA and has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Chicago, and Columbia University. His research interests include medieval Armenian history, modern Armenian nationalism, and Armenian film and theater. Cowe is the author of five books and the editor of four others. A regular contributor to Armenological journals, Cowe has received a grant from the National Council on Eurasian and East European Research to investigate the post-Soviet publishing industry in the Republic of Armenia.