The Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education is pleased to announce a lecture on War and Ethnic Cleansing: The Smyrna Catastrophe, 1922-2012 with Dr. Richard Hovannisian on September 5  in Beckman Hall, Room 404 at 7 p.m.

Dr. Hovannisian is the Chancellor Fellow in the Department of History and the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University and Emeritus Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at University of California, Los Angeles.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the Smyrna Catastrophe when much of the city, the second largest in the Ottoman Empire, was destroyed by fire during the final phase of the Greco-Turkish War. The calamity marked the end of a strong Christian presence in the historic Aegean coastal regions and turned hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians into refugees.

In this illustrated lecture, preeminent Armenian historian Richard Hovannisian will discuss the important role of Smyrna (Izmir) in modern Armenian history and the inferno that engulfed the city in September 1922.
Dr. Hovannisian is the author and editor of many books, including Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (2003) and The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies (2007). In 2007, he was honored with the first “I Witness Award” of the Jewish World Watch.

This event is free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact, Ashley Bloomfield at 714.532.7760.