The Armenian Mirror Spectator writes that Dr. Susan Pattie recently joined the Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA) as its new director.
As the new director, Pattie hopes to build upon ALMA’s history of community outreach, saying, “What interested me most is the outreach and making the heritage come alive, and also making it relevant to the contemporary world. ALMA does an amazing job of preserving cultural treasures and bringing people in to show them how to connect to their history and heritage.”
We should recall that in 201l, Pattie and Armenian Institute colleagues published a children’s educational guidebook (available at ALMA) titled, “Who Are the Armenian People?”
“The project grew out of a conversation with a parent in London who wanted to talk to children about Armenian history, but wasn’t sure how to go about it,” Pattie noted adding
“We discuss the history of the Armenian people. We also need to explain what genocide is so that children will understand. That section took a long time to write. It talks about survivors as well as those Turkish people who helped some survivors escape — how the Diaspora of today began. What is important is that they [children] understand that not only were lives lost but a way of life was lost.”
Note, in addition to several larger projects in the works, Pattie shared that there will be an ALMA lecture on November 15, featuring, Nora Lessersohn, a Harvard University Divinity School researcher, discussing the cultural traditions of the Ottoman-Armenian community.