Author: Michael James Erdman
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Britanahay Personalities
An exploration of the different people connected to display items in the Britanahay Exhibition at the British Library and their broader life stories.
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Britanahay Opening Celebration
The opening speech for Britanahay, a display celebrating Armenian-British heritage at the British Library.
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Britanahay Բրիտանահայ: Armeno-British History at the British Library
From 27 September 2025 until 22 February 2026, the British Library’s Sir John S. Ritblatt Treasures Gallery offers visitors a unique view onto Armenian-British history. Entitled Britanahay Բրիտանահայ: Armenian and British, the four-case display brings together items from the British Library collection that highlight Armeno-British communities and interactions. What’s more, it’s an interactive experience with…
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Poetic Emancipation: The Political Verse of Nûredîn Zaza
In this blog post, I explore the history of a small booklet of Kurdish poetry about the struggle of the PDK for Kurdish self-determination, tracking out its contributors and likely place of production.
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A Hopeless Venture: The Story of Huïs
In this article, I explore the history and content of Huïs, a newspaper published in Armenian in the Latin alphabet in Varna, Bulgaria in the 1880s.
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Aboard Aeschylus
A reflection on reading ‘abd al-Rahmān Munīf’s Sharq al-Mutawassit around the fall of the Assad regime.
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Anatolian Memories
A look at memories and memorializations of multiethnic Anatolia through a variety of memoirs and fiction works.
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Promising Freedom: Cold War Albanian Papers in Istanbul
In this blog post, I explore the exile Albanian newspaper Besa, appearing in Istanbul from 1953 to the 1970s, and its relationship to broader Albanian cultural production in the country.
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Alev ve Kül: From the Ashes of a Collection
A look at an obscure short Turkish novel published in Bulgaria in 1927, and what we can learn about its author, context, and potential importance for broader literary history.
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Flipping pages: an Overview of Kurdish Periodical Culture
An look at the British Library’s Kurdish periodical collection, with a contextualization of the holdings, and copious links to help those interested find research about periodicals in the various Kurdish languages and dialects.
From Altay to Yughur 