Denver-based investigative researcher and human rights advocate Simon Maghakyan documents Azerbaijan’s ongoing erasure of medieval Armenian monuments and researches politics of cultural preservation.

He is a visiting scholar at Tufts University, lectures in International Relations at the University of Colorado Denver, and directs Save Armenian Monuments. Maghakyan is also a PhD student in heritage crime at Cranfield University.

Maghakyan has worked with the advocacy organizations Amnesty International and the Armenian National Committee of America and was the initiator of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s pioneer satellite investigation into cultural destruction.

His widely-cited 2019 investigative report, “A Regime Conceals Its Erasure of Indigenous Armenian Culture,” co-authored with Sarah Pickman for Hyperallergic, conclusively exposed Azerbaijan’s covert erasure of 28,000 medieval monuments.

His writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, The Asia Times, The Denver Post, Foreign Policy, Global Voices Online, History Today, Hyperallergic, Newsweek, and The Washington Post.

His work has been profiled by or cited in The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Radio Free Europe, The Sunday Times, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, France24, the 2021 Oxford Handbook of International Cultural Heritage Law, DemocracyNow! and Time Magazine.

Maghakyan founded Djulfa.com in 2007 to publicize the destruction of the largest medieval Armenian cemetery.

Maghakyan may reached through his Twitter profile.