A Massacre Averted: An Armenian Town, an American Nurse, and the Turkish Army They Resisted

Nancy Klancher, Monday, April 25, 2011

4:30 pm, Porter Hall 100 (Gregg Hall)

The final years of the Ottoman Empire were characterized by ongoing wars, resulting in unspeakable suffering for civilians of all ethnic backgrounds, but particularly Armenians. The mass deportation and deaths of Armenians, beginning in 1915, prompted Woodrow Wilson to send a corp of relief workers to this region. Among them was a 37-year-old nurse from Pennsylvania named Mary Super, whose memoirs illuminate in dramatic detail a struggle against wholesale massacre in the midst of civil war. In 1920, Super and five American and Canadian relief workers found themselves in the middle of a two-month Kemalist siege of the small mountain town of Hadjin. Super was a friend of the author’s family. Nancy Klancher found the memoirs among her grandmother’s possessions and will discuss the historical, religious, and cultural context of Super’s harrowing tale.

Nancy Klancher is a PhD candidate in the Cooperative Doctoral Program in Religion at the University of Pittsburgh and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Her research is in the area of New Testament studies, specifically reception history as cultural transmission, and textual depictions of religious authority, religious identity, and religious conflict. Related research and teaching interests include literary theory, feminist theory, and the origins of Christianity.
Her publications include “The Male Soul in Drag: Women-as-Job in the Testament of Job” in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudipigrapha (2010), and A Massacre Averted: An Armenian Town, An American Nurse, and the Turkish Army They Resisted, Markus Wiener Publishers (March, 2011).
From 1999-2010, Klancher was the Director of the Graduate Programs Office at Carnegie Mellon, an office dedicated to mentoring, supporting, and advocating on behalf of graduate students university-wide.