Sona Mnatsakanyan is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Slavonic Languages and Literatures (Humboldt University, Berlin), supervised by Professor Susanne Frank. As a PhD candidate she is a member of Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies, doing research at the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities for the project (Post)Soviet Literary Cosmopolis. 

Sona Mnatsakanyan got both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Armenian Studies from the State University of Armenia in Yerevan.

The Topos of Yerevan

Narratives of the city of Yerevan were integral to Armenian literary nation-building from the mid-19^th century onward. Today, Yerevan’s landscape is a palimpsest of national memory in which the literary canon plays a constitutive role.

Mnatsakanyan's PhD project will investigate the strategies of constructing the national semantics of Yerevan in fictional prose and poetry. It will also observe the link between national memory and urban space, with a special focus on the representation of the literary canon in the form of toponyms—places named after celebrated Armenian authors and their works.

This research is a part of the larger (Post-)Soviet Literary Cosmopolis project, which contributes to the broader study of the concept of world literature in Soviet cultural politics.