Seyran Zaven Grigoryan is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History and Criticism of Modern Armenian Literature at the Faculty of Armenian Philology , Yerevan State University . A prolific scholar born in 1962, he is equally at home in Armenian, Russian and English and has published extensively on modern and contemporary Armenian poetry, comparative literature and cultural memory. His research trajectory focuses on the intricate interplay between Armenian poetry and world literary traditions, with particular emphasis on the works of Yeghishe Charents, Paruyr Sevak, Vahagn Davtyan and other towering figures of the 20th century. He examines how biblical, folkloric and Indo-European motifs are re-imagined within Armenian modernist and post-modernist aesthetics, and how memory, myth and history coalesce in poetic form. Across more than fifteen major articles and three monographs published between 2015 and 2025, Grigoryan has traced recurring themes such as sacred beverages in world literature, the reception of Rig-vedic thought by Armenian poets, the genre of memoir-poem, and the symbolic afterlives of Komitas. His comparative studies extend from Marina Tsvetaeva’s dialogue with Paruyr Sevak to Charlotte Salzmann’s echoes in Abovyan and Charents, revealing dense networks of trans-national literary exchange. Labs & Teams: As Head of Department, he leads a research group dedicated to textual criticism and digital humanities approaches to Armenian literary corpora, while mentoring graduate projects on modern Armenian poetry.
