This edited volume tells the story of three Scandinavian women missionaries who dedicated their lives to helping Armenian women and children. They became eyewitnesses to the 1915 Armenian genocide and continued to work among Armenian refugees during the ensuing decades in Lebanon, Syria, Greece and Soviet Armenia. On the basis of these women’s transnational lives and narratives, the book explores humanitarian aid to Armenians from a Scandinavian angle, biographical sources, perspectives and methods serving as points of departure. It also investigates the transnational, religious and gendered dimensions of relief work. The importance and the dilemmas of small-scale translocal projects and humanitarian networks are examined; so are religious motivations and missionary practices in humanitarianism as well as the complex role played by women as victims and agents in wars, encompassing their vulnerability and their ‘caring power’.
Price: £25.00
Pages: 328
Publisher: Lund University Press
Imprint: Lund University Press
Series: Lund University Press
Publication Date:
23 June 2026
ISBN: 9789198994162
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Refugees, HISTORY / Asia / General, HISTORY / Military / Wars & Conflicts (Other), RELIGION / Christian Ministry / Missions, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century, HISTORY / Women, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Genocide & War Crimes, Religious mission and Religious Conversion, Genocide and ethnic cleansing, Refugees and political asylum, Gender studies: women and girls, Social and cultural history, Military history
Prologue: The film that became a book Svante Lundgren
1 Transnational lives and narratives – points of departure Maria Småberg
2 The Armenophile movement and Nordic women missionaries Svante Lundgren
3 ‘Not just to give them food and clothing, but also to give them something for their souls’: Bodil Biørn and the Armenians, 1905 – 34 Inger Marie Okkenhaug
4 The various faces of compassion, or ‘what we have done out of love for our Lord cannot have been in vain’: Alma Johansson and the Armenians, 1901 – 41 Maria Småberg
5 ‘Only one road is open – the road upwards’: Maria Jacobsen and the Armenian people, 1907 – 60 Kate Royster
Epilogue Svante Lundgren and Maria Småberg
Timeline
Appendix ‘We would learn to fly …’ Memories from a childhood in the Birds’ Nest Elizabeth Melikian
