Biography
Élodie Gavrilof holds a PhD in contemporary history (EHESS, 2024), recognised with a prize for best thesis in history of education by the French Ministry of Education’s History Committee (CHIMEN, 2026). Her dissertation examined how Armenian schools in Turkey and Soviet Armenia negotiated questions of language, memory, and identity under Kemalist and Soviet constraints during the interwar period (1919–1939).
She is currently an associate researcher at CERCEC (EHESS, Paris) and IFEA (Istanbul), and teaches modern and contemporary history in the Eurasian Studies department at INALCO. Her research now centres on the long-term construction of Turkish and Azerbaijani otherness in Armenian national narratives, examining how mechanisms of dehumanisation are rooted in the violent history of the 19th and 20th century. Drawing on Armenian archives, satirical press, and cartographic sources, it combines microhistorical analysis with Border Studies approaches. Part of this project also engages with online memory narratives surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, mobilising OSINT methodologies to analyse the circulation and reappropriation of historical narratives on social media.
She has also worked on the trajectory of the Tbrotsaser school, an Armenian institution that fled the Ottoman Empire and resettled near Paris after years of exile. Tracing how the school, its teachers, and its pupils migrated together reveals the mechanisms of exile and integration at a microhistorical scale, and shows how a diasporic institution reinvented itself within the French educational landscape. Her work on this project has been accepted for publication in Histoire de l’Éducation.