About the Authors
Alice Lafdjian Ketabgian
Alice Lafdjian Ketabgian was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, and is a descendant of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. She received her childhood education from Aramyan Ounchiyan Elementary School in Kadiköy, followed by a high school education at Üsküdar Amerikan Kiz Lisesi in Üsküdar.
Upon arrival in Southern California in 1962, she attended La Verne College for two years and then transferred to UCLA to receive an M.S. in Human Physiology from the School of Medicine in 1968. When her youngest child was two and a half, she started attending Cal State LA in the evenings, eventually completing the requirements to practice as a registered dietitian. After working as a clinical dietician in her husband Dr. Gregory Ketabgian’s internal medicine office in Pasadena for several years, she became the office manager and functioned in that capacity for the following 25 years until their retirement in 2004. In this office, she and her husband served many waves of Armenian immigrants escaping upheaval in the Middle East and Soviet Armenia.
In 2016, Avid Readers published her book, Life in Istanbul—One Family’s Odyssey. Previously she has translated Anneannem by Fethiye Çetin to English in 2006 (unpublished). An account of her Pilgrimage to Historic Armenia was published in the Armenian Observer the same year.
Tamara Ketabgian
Tamara Ketabgian is the daughter of Alice and Gregory Ketabgian and is Professor of English and the William and Gayle Keefer Chair of the Humanities at Beloit College, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin. She received a B.A. in English and Fine Arts from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in English at Princeton University, and is the author of The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture (University of Michigan Press) and various essays on science fiction, environmental studies, and nineteenth-century literature and science. Her research has been recognized by awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the North American Victorian Studies Association. In addition, she has been active in promoting the public humanities, most recently through an NEH-funded community reading project on Ursula K. Le Guin. She maintains a lively interest in fiction and life writing about the Armenian experience.