Hazal Halavut is a postdoctoral fellow for the 2025-26 year, working under the supervision of Alison Crosby, professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies.
Halavut’s work traces the afterlives of colonial violence and genocide across memory, history and culture, attending to how they are held, denied and reimagined within the psychic, political and aesthetic life of the collective. Her postdoctoral project at York University, Georgetown Boys: An Archive of Genocide, Collective Memory, and Canada’s “Noble Experiment”, turns to an extraordinary archive of survival and imagination: Ararat (1926–30), a journal produced by Armenian orphans brought to Georgetown, Ontario under Canada’s assimilationist experiment after surviving the Armenian Genocide. One of the earliest diasporic Armenian archives in Canada and among the very few child-authored genocide archives worldwide, Ararat is a site where boyhood was staged as masculinity, performed by the boys in ways that both reflected and responded to Canada’s demand that they become workers, men and proof of a successful experiment in nation-building. The project investigates how survival, memory and gendered belonging were forged under this assimilationist regime and how fiction, bilingualism and adaptation worked as strategies of refusal and creative survival within the demands of Canadianization.
This research builds on her doctoral dissertation, Archives of Absence: Nation’s Sleep, Perpetrator’s Dream, and Afterlives of Genocide (University of Toronto), now being developed into a book, which argues that absence functions as a generative force in the perpetrator’s national imaginary, a “technology of wakefulness” that organizes law, historiography and aesthetics in Turkey. Moving from the archive of absence in Turkey to the archive of creative survival produced by the Georgetown Boys in Canada, Halavut’s work rethinks trauma in a psychic and political economy shaped by the complicities of states, the demands of labor and the disciplining of gender and unsettled through imagination.