Professor Tololyan is one of the founders of the field of diaspora studies and the founding editor of the award-winning DIASPORA: A JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL STUDIES, which he has been editing since 1991. He is interested in the mobility of populations and cultures, and asks how the increasing level of migration and dispersion brings new populations to the West, how these dispersions become ethnic and diasporic, and how these in turn reshape the literature, culture and politics of the nations/states that host them. World Literature, in particular global anglophone fiction, is part of his research, as are ethnicity, nationalism, transnationalism and globalization.

Professor Tololyan is of Armenian origin and in his early life had personal experience of being stateless, a migrant, and a diasporic person. He grew up in Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon and immigrated to the US. He received his BA from Harvard in Molecular Biology and his PhD from Brown in Comparative Literature. He has published articles on a range of topics, including the American novelist Thomas Pynchon and co-founded a journal devoted to his work (Pynchon Notes), as well as on terrorism, narrative, nationalism, and diasporas, and has lectured widely in the US, western Europe, and Armenia.