Nazelie Doghramadjian

Nazelie Doghramadjian is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research focuses on intellectual choices made in the Armenian community in the United States when preserving their records and their impact on academic archives and special collections. She works with community stakeholders, scholars, and practitioners alike. She holds a B.A. in Humanities from Villanova University. Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and juried proceedings such as Archival Science on Armenian women’s archives, Archivaria on diaspora archives and archival practices, and the Association for Library and Information Science Education on personal archival stewardship. She has presented her work on archival silences, narrative approaches to recordkeeping, and best principles for working with diaspora archives at several conferences in archival, American, and Armenian studies fields. Before starting graduate school, Nazelie worked for a variety of non- profit organizations including Data & Society Research Institute, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and A Better Tech NYU.

Pronouns

she/her

Dissertation title

Personal Stewardship in the Armenian-American Community: Broadening Institutional Stewardship Definitions and Practices 

Dissertation abstract

Archival stewardship is a useful concept in understanding an archivist’s management of records and collections. Without the practical application of stewardship, archives would be less accessible to the institution and the public, and far less physically protected. This work remains invaluable in the archival field, but it is both inadequate in capturing and frequently leaves out the care, labor, and intellectual contributions of community members who are stewards of their own archives prior to an institutional accession. By better understanding the archival stewardship work of personal archivists in the Armenian community in the U.S., this dissertation broadens the archival field’s definition of stewardship to include unique, community-specific contributions, its findings impacting core theoretical concerns such as intellectual contributions to history and archival silences. This comprehensive study is deployed in two phases. First, it uses semi-structured interviews with institutional archivists and librarians to delve deeper into stewardship practices, how archivists have collaborated with the community to build their collections, and how these collections are ultimately used. Second, it conducts an extensive ethnographic study on a current community member who is stewarding a key family archive in preparation for donation to an institutional archive. This phase tracks a collection from its start (as a family archive) to finish (its accession by an academic institution). Using a feminist epistemological framework, this dissertation takes seriously knowledge produced by community members, explores the impacts personal stewards have on archives, and thus broadens and strengthens the model of archival stewardship as we know it. The primary questions that drive this research are: How does personal archival stewardship broaden academic archival stewardship and what is the relationship between these two? What does personal archival stewardship look like in practice in the Armenian community? 

Areas of interest

Diaspora Studies; Gender and Women's Studies; Epistemic Injustice; Curation Infrastructures; Ethnography; Qualitative Methods

Education

B.A. Humanities, Villanova University, 2018

Selected publications

Doghramadjian, N., Rayan, T., Ramirez, Y., Rayburn, A., Suanmuanlian, T., Prosper, S., Punzalan, R. (Accepted, Forthcoming Spring 2027). “Building with the Community in Mind”: The Generative Contributions of Diaspora Archives. Archivaria.

Doghramadjian, N., Garcia, P, Punzalan, R. (2025). An Archival World Turns: Armenian Women’s Archives in Southeast Michigan. Archival Science. 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09468-4.

Doghramadjian, N., Ramirez, Y. (Accepted, Forthcoming November 2026). Do You Know Where This Record Has Been? Archival Creators Disrupt Archival Standards. Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference. Buffalo, NY.

Doghramadjian, N. (2025). Personal Archival Practices: Broadening Our Understanding of Archival Stewardship. Proceedings of the ALISE Annual Conference. Kansas City, MO. https://doi.org/10.21900/j.alise.2025.2043.