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Thursday, April 2, 2026

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1800 - 1st performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 1st Symphony in C.

1877 - 1st Easter egg roll held on White House lawn.

1968 - “2001: A Space Odyssey” directed by Stanley Kubrick premieres at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C.

1977 - Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album goes to No. 1 and stays atop the charts for 31 weeks.

Experts warn oversaturating Board with corporate voices could overshadow GW’s academic mission. 
GW Hatchet.

NASA’s Artemis II lifts off on historic moon mission.
The Washington Post.

10 Art Books for Your Spring Reading List.
Hyperallergic.

Image credit: Thomas Simsarian Dolan

This week’s newsletter highlights PhD alum Thomas Simsarian Dolan, a historian of Middle Eastern and North African diasporas. At its core, his work is shaped by his deep familial ties to the MENA region, and a desire to confront persistent misunderstandings that structure how Americans imagine the histories and peoples of the Middle East—misreadings that feel especially urgent in the present moment.

Across his scholarship, Thomas interrogates how categories, disciplines, and political formations have rendered certain populations—particularly Armenians and other minoritized groups—both hypervisible in moments of crisis and structurally unseen in dominant historical and policy frameworks. In Armenianland, Thomas currently serves as historian at the Armenian General Benevolent Union, where he is completing an institutional history examining the organization’s global evolution over the past four decades. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, extensive archival research, and fieldwork in Armenian communities in over a dozen countries, the project is a kind of multi-sited historical ethnography that traces how diaspora institutions shape, mediate, and contest Armenian identity across radically different political and social contexts. Alongside this work, he edited a volume on the Nagorno-Karabakh war, currently under review, which analyzes the conflict through questions of military and technological failure. Forthcoming academic work also includes review essays in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Review of Middle East Studies, and a co-authored chapter with fellow GW PhD alum Zaynab Quadri on the political economy of Islamophobia. Someday, he will get back to finishing his dissertation turned book project Ambigua Gens: Unmaking and Unseeing the Modern Middle East—but for now it is mostly a lurking anxiety.

Beyond more traditional academic work, Thomas is exploring avenues that remain true to his core values and interventions. For instance, over the past year, he has worked as a consultant with Los Angeles County’s Anti-Racism, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative, where he is writing data and demographic policy. He is also now developing a hybrid Armenian foodways project in collaboration with Lebanese Armenian chef and entrepreneur Aline Kamakian. This work will pair historical essays with recipes—both traditional and contemporary—to reconstruct Armenians as a constitutive part of Middle Eastern food history. The project intervenes directly in both academic and public discourse by challenging the methodological nationalism that continues to structure Middle East Studies and Food Studies therein, as well as the parallel domain of state-funded culinary branding and commodification that recasts shared, multiethnic traditions as bounded national products.

As to some other highlights, Thomas recently gave lectures on Armenian Gotham at the New York Public Library, at Yale on the policy implications of the emerging MENA, for the off-Broadway play Meet the Cartozians last fall, and emcee’d the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research gala in Boston last October. Now back in New York after extended stretches of research travel, Thomas is settling back into a more “grounded” life. For those who knew him at GW, life is still an overserving of food, fitness, theater, and loud living—though now accompanied by a growing Facebook Marketplace addiction and increasingly over-furnished apartment.

Bodies in Motion
GW WGSS Annual Yulee Lecture

Join the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) community on Friday, April 3rd for our annual Yulee Lecture. We are excited to feature two groundbreaking scholars: Professor Deborah A. Thomas and Professor Jade Power-Sotomayor.

When: Friday, April 3, 2026; 4:00 PM
Where: Duques Hall, Room 151

RSVP here!

An Uncanny Index: Revivalist Design and
American Identity
GW Corcoran Art History Program

Join us for K.L.H. Wells' Book Talk! How did Americans from different regions, classes, and ethnicities learn to identify with the early history of the United States as their own heritage? In this talk, K.L.H. Wells argues that colonial revivalist projects of the 1930s and 1940s used uncanny, immersive design to shape the national and racial identity of White Americans. Focusing on the Index of American Design, a WPA Federal Art Project now housed at the National Gallery of Art, Wells examines how the uncanniness of colonial revivalism encouraged White Americans from a variety of backgrounds to subjectively identify with the nation’s “founders” and “pioneers.” By exploring how the Index made American history accessible to new audiences while reinforcing White national identity, Wells suggests that uncanny revivals can help us understand some of the contradictions of our own political moment.

When: Friday, April 3, 2026; 6:00 PM
Where: Smith Hall of Art, Room 114

RSVP here!

A Kinder Irony: Functions of Humor in Youth Literature
GW Philosophy Peter Caws Memorial Lecture

Drawing together concepts from existentialism, psychoanalysis, and humor theory, this talk explores how children of various ages come to perceive a text as humorous. To understand the origins and need for humor, I suggest that we require a metamodernist understanding of irony that situates its importance beyond that of a rhetorical strategy or a semiotic resource, but as a basic condition of existence that demands a response. By looking at the fate of alazonic characters in picturebooks and sardonic humorists in YA, I examine how humor supports the ability to respond to the ironic tensions that oscillate between reality, pretense, and aspirations in positive ways rather than resorting to denial, despair or cool detachment.

Dr. Coats is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Cambridge, and is also a Visiting Associate Professor in the MA and MFA programs in children's literature at Hollins University. She has authored three books, co-edited six volumes, and published more than 50 peer-reviewed chapters and articles on the history, forms, genres, and theoretical concerns of children’s and young adult literature.

When: Friday, April 10, 2026; 4:00 PM
Where: Duques Hall, Room 152

Institute for Middle East Studies Annual Conference
Tech Futures: The Science of Life, Death, and Ecology in the Middle East

When: Friday, April 17, 2026; 9:00-4:00 PM
Where: 1957 E St NW, Room 602

RSVP here!

Alum Gabriela Arroyo (BA ‘21) was recently accepted to UC Davis Law School and will be attending in the Fall!

Alum Justin L. Mann (PhD ‘18) recently published his monograph Breaking the World: Black Insecurity and the Horizons of Speculative Fiction with Duke University Press! Order your copy here!

Call for Papers: The Oxonian Review is currently accepting pitches for cultural criticism, memoir, and non-academic essays. Click here to learn more // Deadline: ongoing.

Call for Applications: The U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music is pleased to offer financial support of up to $2,500 for graduate student-led events that promote wider engagement with current research on popular music. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 15, 2026. 

Call for Applications: Democracy House’s Young Leaders Summer Institute is currently accepting applications for Summer 2026. Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 19, 2026.

Call for Attendees: The 2026 DC History Conference is now open for attendance registration! Click here to learn more // Deadline: Apr. 30, 2026.

Call for Applications: The Albert H. Small Center for National Capital Area Studies is currently hiring a part-time summer intern. Click here to learn more // Deadline: rolling.

Call for Applications: League of Filmmakers is currently inviting applications for the Industry Writing & Journalism Internship. Click here to learn more // Deadline: rolling.

Call for Applications: The Museum at Eldridge Street is seeking a Freelance Festival Coordinator for their upcoming street festival. Click here to learn more // Deadline: rolling.

Need Support?

Like what you see? Have spotlights, kudos, events, or opportunities that you would like to share? We want to hear from you! Navigate to our feedback form using the link below, or more simply, forward your tip to amst@gwu.edu.