Levon Hmayak Abrahamian is currently the head of the Department of Contemporary Anthropological Studies at the Institute of Archaeology & Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.

Educated at the Yerevan State University (MSc in Molecular Biophysics, 1970), he received his PhD in Anthropology from the Institute of Ethnography (Academy of Science USSR) in Moscow in 1978. Dr. Abrahamian served as director of the project “Transformations of Identity in Armenia in the 20^th century” from 1996-2000, and of the project “Anthropology of a Crisis: Ethnography of Survival in the Post-communist Armenia” from 2000 – 2004.

Since 1990, Dr. Abrahamian has taught courses in anthropology at Yerevan State University, in the Departments of History, Sociology, and Theology. Dr. Abrahamian was a Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Pittsburgh University (1994), and at University of California at Berkeley (1997) UC Berkeley where he was also William Saroyan Professor of Armenian Studies. In 2001, Dr. Abrahamian was a Visiting Professor of Armenian Studies in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University where he taught a course on Armenian identity, which served as a basis for his book Armenian Identity in a Changing World, published by Mazda Press in 2006.  Dr. Abrahamian is also the author of Primitive Festival and Mythology (1993, Yerevan: Academy of Sciences of Armenia Press, in Russian), co-editor of Armenian Folk Arts, Culture, and Identity (2001, Indiana University Press), and author of Conversations Near the Tree (2005, Moscow: Yazyki slavianskikh kul’tur, in Russian).