UC Berkeley undergraduate student Ernest Baghdasaryan received the Wells prize from the Department of English for an essay he wrote titled "An Armenian History of Shakespeare." To feature his work and his experience at UC Berkeley, the Armenian Studies Program asked him to give a brief interview.
Can you tell a little bit about yourself? What has your path to UC Berkeley been like, and what has your experience at UC Berkeley been like?
Ernest Baghdasaryan: I am a first-generation immigrant whose family immigrated from Armenia to Los Angeles when I was still an infant. Though I’ve enjoyed reading since I was a kid, there was a particular professor in community college who really inspired me to pursue an English degree. It was around the same time, during the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, that I developed the desire to actively foster my connection with my language and culture. I transferred to Berkeley last fall, and I’ve found it to be an incredibly rich environment for pursuing my intellectual interests as both an English major and an Armenian.
Can you tell us more about your engagement with Armenian Studies on campus?
E.B.: Yes, I'm minoring in Armenian Studies. I've taken Armenian 101A and 101B [language courses] and will be taking History 177A: Armenia and Armenians from Ancient to Medieval Eras this coming semester. I'm also a research assistant in the "Armenian Language in the Bay Area" program, where I help [graduate student Julianne Kapner’s research project] to collect data by conducting interviews with Armenian speakers.
Tells us about your paper that received the Wells Prize? How did you come to pick the topic?
E.B.: My paper is titled "An Armenian History of Shakespeare." It came to be because I was enrolled in Professor Oliver Arnold's research seminar about Shakespeare. When we were introducing ourselves on the first day professor Arnold took note of the fact that I am Armenian and suggested that my research topic could be about the relevance of Shakespeare's plays in my culture. "What could there possibly be to say about this?", I thought. Some precursory attempts at research weren't promising: nobody had written about this topic in English in the last sixty years. When I dug deeper for Armenian-language scholarship, I discovered that the topic in fact had a rich history that had not crossed the language barrier. There was so much to say about Shakespeare's role in modern Armenian history that I had difficulty constraining the scope of the paper in order to write it in time, and the final shape that it took is essentially a general history of his influence on Armenian culture, literature, and politics.
Can you tell us what the Wells prize is? How did you learn about it?
E.B.: The Wells prize is for the best essay written in all of the undergraduate English research seminars (English 190) of the semester. The instructor of each seminar is asked to submit a nomination, then the Prize Committee reviews all of the nominations and selects one. Winning the prize actually came as a total surprise to me — my professor didn't tell me that he had nominated mine! I never thought that it would get this far, but I'm proud of my work as well. I feel that this prize reflects my efforts to conduct research in Armenian on such a broad and unexplored topic.
What are your plans with this paper and in general?
E.B.: As I mentioned, I had to heavily constrain the scope of my paper in order for it to be feasible to write in the span of a few months. Much of what I touch on in the paper could have easily been an individual line of research or material for a thesis. I ended up cutting the entire second half of the paper, where I was developing a comparative analysis of Hovhannes Massehian's famous Armenian translation of Hamlet with the original. I will likely flesh that out as a project for an independent study in the future. For now, I'm focused on writing my law school apps and preparing for the LSAT.