AI's treasured librarian Gagik Stepan-Sarkissian talks with Dr. Shushan Karapetian, Deputy Director of University of Southern California's Institute of Armenian Studies to discuss the plethora of experiences that exist within bilingual individuals, seen often amongst global Armenian communities. The varied experiences of heritage and native Armenian speakers prove themselves cyclical, a cycle Shushan strongly believes must be changed for the betterment of language practice and preservation.
Shushan Karapetian is Deputy Director of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies, where she leads the Institute’s research and scholarship initiatives, deepening the integration with entities both on and off campus and expanding the scope of academic programming. She received a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures from UCLA in 2014, where she taught Armenian Studies courses for ten years. Her dissertation, “‘How Do I Teach My Kids My Broken Armenian?’: A Study of Eastern Armenian Heritage Language Speakers in Los Angeles,” received the Society for Armenian Studies Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2015. In 2018, she was the recipient of the Russ Campbell Young Scholar Award in recognition of outstanding scholarship in heritage language research. She also serves as associate director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA. Shushan researches, teaches, and writes about the Armenian experience, particularly focusing on competing ideologies at the intersection of language and the construction of transnational identity.
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