Edgar Martirosyan is a PhD student in the Department of Rhetoric. Before coming to Berkeley, he earned dual BAs in English and Education Sciences from the University of Florida. His research asks what it means to survive historical catastrophe and how catastrophic survival is situated vis-à-vis national narratives of historical continuity and inheritance, the archive, and theories of subjectivity. If catastrophe marks an end to a particular historical world, what forms of mourning may allow that world a claim to a future? Giving breadth to this inquiry is an attention to the survival of language, the language of survival, as their possibilities are imagined in literature and translation.
Research Interests:
- Comparative literature (Armenian, German, Russian)
- 19th and 20th-century continental philosophy
- Psychoanalysis
- Critical theory
- Queer theory
- Armenian studies