Campaign launched to create Richard G. Hovannisian Library in Armenia

By Lia Avagyan

A global fundraising campaign has been launched to support the creation of the Richard G. Hovannisian Library in central Yerevan, a new institution that will house the personal collection of the late historian Richard G. Hovannisian and serve as a center for Armenian studies.

The library will be named after Hovannisian, one of the most influential scholars of modern Armenian history. Organizers said it will permanently house more than 10,000 books and volumes collected by the historian over his lifetime.

Hovannisian, who died in 2023 at the age of 90, was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is best known for his four-volume history of the First Republic of Armenia and his work documenting the Armenian Genocide. He founded UCLA’s Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History, which was later renamed in his honor.

According to the project’s organizers, work is already underway in Yerevan to catalog and index the collection. The books are expected to be transferred to a purpose-built facility by the end of the year.

The library is envisioned as a cultural and academic hub, hosting conferences, lectures, symposia, and educational programs focused on Armenian and regional studies.

“We hope to build, in my grandfather’s name, a library that will not only perpetuate his legacy, but that will allow new generations of Armenians to discover the riches of our past and to be inspired and propelled toward our future,” said Garin Hovannisian, Richard Hovannisian’s grandson and the founder of Creative Armenia, which is helping implement the project.

The Hovannisian family and several Armenian institutions have funded much of the project’s initial construction and development costs. The newly launched fundraising campaign aims to finance the final outfitting of the facility, continued archival work, and future programming.

Born in California in 1932 to survivors of the Armenian Genocide, Hovannisian played a pioneering role in establishing Armenian studies as an academic field in the United States. In addition to his scholarship on the First Republic of Armenia, he assembled one of the largest oral history collections of Armenian Genocide survivors, now housed at the USC Shoah Foundation.

The library is expected to open in Yerevan later this year.