Born 26 May, 1926, Istanbul (Turquia), deceased August 2, 2019.
Vahakn N. Dadrian received his undergraduate and graduate education in Europe at the University of Berlin (mathematics), the University of Vienna (history) and the University of Zürich (international law). His training in the United States was in the social sciences, culminating with a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
Vahakn N. Dadrian received his undergraduate education in Europe at the University of Berlin (mathematics), the University of Vienna (history) and the University of Zürich (international law). He received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago.
His academic background includes affiliations with Harvard University as a Research Fellow, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Guest Professor and Duke University as a Visiting Professor.
In the last twenty years he has lectured extensively in French, English and German in such European institutions as the Free University of Berlin and the Universities of Munich, Parma, Torino, Zürich, Uppsala, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne, Bochum, Münster, Amsterdam, Utrecht, Geneva, Brussels and UNESCO’s Paris center.
Professor Dadrian was the first Armenian scholar invited in 1995 to the British Parliament, House of Commons, to deliver a lecture commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. In 1998, in a special ceremony, he was inducted into the ranks of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia. At the same time, he was decorated by that republic’s president with the Khorenatzi Medal, Armenia’s highest cultural award.
His groundbreaking research has been supported by two large grants from the National Science Foundation, resulting in the publication of two separate monographs by the Yale Journal of International Law.
One of them is a legal analysis of the Armenian genocide from the perspective of international law; the other, published in 1998, examines within the same perspective the comparative aspects of the Armenian and Jewish cases of genocide.
Following a series of specifically arranged lectures in Armenia in April 2005 commemorating the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Prof. Dadrian was declared Honorary Professor by four universities in Armenia. Additionally, he received three gold medals, one of which was presented by the Rector of Yerevan State University, and the other by the President of Yerevan’s Law School—both of them being the highest awards of these institutions.
In the United States, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, during its Sixth Biennial Conference, June 4-7, 2005, bestowed on him its Lifetime Achievement Award—the first ever granted. In May 2005, he was chosen as a recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.