Zenas Kevorkian (1910-1991) was a career educator, a United States Naval Officer during World War II, and a hobbyist photographer in Rhode Island. In 1934 he graduated from Brown University with a major in history and a minor in education. He attended Brown Graduate School and worked as a student teacher in history at Central High School in Providence from 1934-35. After this he took numerous extension courses at Rhode Island College of Education and taught general science, mathematics, and journalism at Roger Williams Junior High School.
In 1942, Kevorkian left Rhode Island and his teaching job to join the United States Navy. He was commissioned as an ensign. He served as an executive officer, and then commanding officer, in the Mediterranean for seventeen months, taking part in twelve invasions in North Africa and southern parts of Italy. After further training in the United States, he served as a commanding officer in the South Pacific for twenty-two months, where he was in the initial invasion of Okinawa. Kevorkian was released to inactive duty as a senior grade lieutenant.
After returning from active military duty, Kevorkian worked as a personnel manager for industry in Woonsocket from 1946 until 1949, when he returned to education to work as a guidance counselor and history teacher at Cranston High School East. In 1958, he became Chairman of the Social Studies Department at Cranston High School West, where we worked for over ten years. While working in the Cranston high schools, he also established and directed adult education programs in Cranston. In 1955 he became Director of the Cranston Adult Education Program, and in 1966 he became Director of the Cranston Adult Basic Education Program. In 1970 he left Cranston High School West to serve as the full-time Director of Adult and Continuing Education for the Cranston School Department until his retirement in 1974.
Throughout his career, Kevorkian was active in over a dozen local, regional, and national educational professional associations. Among them, he served as President of the Barnard Club (1962-63), President of the Rhode Island Association of Public School Adult Education (1966-68), and Chairman of the State Membership Committee of the National Association of Public Continuing Education’s for fourteen years. Kevorkian was also deeply committed to numerous community, fraternal, religious, and Armenian organizations. He served on the boards of the Cranston Committee for Better Schools, the Cranston Historical Society, and the International Institute of Providence. He was active in the Armenian Missionary Association of America, and he served as communicant and deacon of the Armenian Euphrates Evangelical Church of Providence.
The bulk of this collection consists of Zenas Kevorkian’s personal photographs, which document his life, family, and community mostly in and around Providence and Cranston, Rhode Island from the 1920s through about 1960. Subjects include photographs of damage left in the wake of the Hurricane of 1938; the U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station grounds in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico in 1939, likely taken by his brother Arthur Kevorkian, who worked for the US Department of Agriculture; trips to New Hampshire, Quebec, Maine, and Washington, D.C. in the 1930s-40s; and scenes from Rhode Island schools where Kevorkian worked, including a National Defense Drive at Roger Williams Junior High School circa early 1940s.
The collection also includes correspondence from Kevorkian to students and teachers at Roger Williams Junior High School during his naval indoctrination at the Amphibious Training Base in Solomons, Maryland in 1942. Additionally, the collection includes Kevorkian’s resume, news clippings related to his work, and a 1988 revision of the constitution of the Barnard Club, a social and pedagogical association of Rhode Island teachers first established in 1878.
Rhode Island College Special Collections holds copyright to materials in this collection created by Zenas Kevorkian. The collection contains materials not created by Kevorkian, which may be under copyright restrictions. Researchers are advised to contact Rhode Island College Special Collections for questions regarding permissions to reproduce, distribute, or otherwise publish material from this collection. Although Rhode Island College has physical ownership of the collection, it does not necessarily hold literary rights to all materials in this collection. It is up to the researcher to determine the owners of the literary rights and to obtain any necessary permissions from them.
The collection is open for research.
Zenas Kevorkian papers, MSS-0042, Special Collections, James P. Adams Library, Rhode Island College.
The collection is arranged into the following series:
The collection was donated by Zenas Kevorkian’s children, Esther R. Kalajian and John Kevorkian, in August 2021. A deed of gift was signed at the time of donation.
This collection was arranged and described by Molly Bruce Patterson in 2021. The guide to this collection was converted to current standard in 2024 by Anne Boylan.
Publications were removed from the collection and added to the Special Collections Zenas Kevorkian Rare Book Collection. Contact Special Collections for further information.
Select materials have been digitized and are available in
This series includes Kevorkian’s personal photographs. Subjects include landmarks, parks, monuments, and vistas predominantly in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey, as well as friends and family members.
This series includes Kevorkian’s resume, news clippings about him, and some correspondence related to his military training.