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TITLE: Twelfth Annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture
SPEAKER: Edward Alexander, Levon Avdoyan
EVENT DATE: 04/28/2005
RUNNING TIME: 58 minutes
DESCRIPTION:
Edward Alexander, retired Foreign Service officer and author, delivered the Twelfth Annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture, "Diplomacy and the Armenian Factor." Alexander's diplomatic career began soon after the end of World War II and lasted into the late 1980s. He anecdotally narrated his dealings with Soviet, Turkish and other diplomatic staff he met on his journeys. By using his Armenian language heritage as a point of departure for his talk, Alexander underlined the role it played in his diplomatic career in the Foreign Service, which took him to both West and East Germany, Hungary and Greece. Levon Avdoyan, the Library's Armenian and Georgian specialist, briefly reported on the growth of the Library's Armenian collections and the state of its programs. The lecture series is sponsored by the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division. It is named after the Armenian holiday that commemorates the battle of Avarayr (A.D. 451), which was waged by Armenian Gen. Vardan Mamikonian and his compatriots against Persian troops who invaded to reimpose Zoroastrianism on the Christian state.
Speaker Biography: Edward Alexander, a retired Foreign Service officer of Armenian descent, has served in West Berlin, Budapest, Athens, East Berlin and Washington, where he established the first Voice of America broadcasts in Armenian to the Soviet Union.
Speaker Biography: Levon Avdoyan is the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist in the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress. He received his bachelor's degree in history from The University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., and his master's, master of philosphy and Ph.D. in ancient history and in Armenian studies at Columbia University under Nina G. Garsoian and Morton Smith.