You may reach the Center for Advanced Genocide Research by email at cagr@usc.edu or by phone at (213) 821-4738.

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Center Staff

Wolf Gruner, PhD
Founding Director

Wolf Gruner holds the Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies, has been a Professor of History at the University of Southern California since 2008 and is the Founding Director of USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research since 2014.

He is a specialist in the history of the Holocaust and in comparative genocide studies. He received his PhD in history in 1994 from the Technical University Berlin as well as his habilitation in 2006. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, Yad Vashem Jerusalem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Women’s Christian University Tokyo, the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg and the Desmond E. Lee Visiting Professor for Global Awareness at Webster University in St. Louis.

He is the author of ten books on the Holocaust, among them Jewish Forced Labor Under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Nazi Racial Aims, with Cambridge University Press (paperback 2008), as well as over 60 academic articles and book chapters. He also co-edited two books; one of them, the translated updated book The Greater German Reich and the Jews: Nazi Persecution Policies in the Annexed Territories 1935-1945, was published in 2015 with Berghahn Books. Its original German edition received the award for most outstanding German studies in humanities and social sciences in 2012. In 2015 Gruner published on a different topic the book Parias de la Patria. El mito de la liberación de los indígenas en la República de Bolivia 1825-1890, in Spanish with Plural Editores, Bolivia. Gruner’s most recent book deals with the persecution of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia 1933-45 and their reactions and is published with Wallstein, Göttingen, Germany in 2016.

He is a member of the International Academic Advisory Board of the Center for the Research on the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, Jerusalem (since 2012), and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Genocide Research (since 2010). He served as a member of the Yad Vashem 2014 International Research Book Prize Committee. For the biannual international conference on the Holocaust “Lessons and Legacies,” he was appointed as the co-chair of the academic program of 2016.

Isabella Lloyd-Damnjanovic, BA
Program Coordinator

Isabella Lloyd-Damnjanovic is the Program Coordinator at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research. As a recent graduate of Princeton University with a major in sociology and a minor in ethics, Isabella is particularly interested in how academic research can influence policymaking and advance social justice. While at Princeton, she conducted research on variation in immigrants’ attitudes toward immigration policy across the American Southwest. She has previously worked with the National Immigration Forum, the International Panel on Social Progress and the Pacific Council on International Policy. In addition to her work at USC Shoah Foundation, Isabella is a tutor with Gold Medal Grads, a nonprofit that offers free college coaching and tutoring to underserved youth. In the future she plans on attending graduate school to pursue a degree in international policy and development with a focus on ethnic conflict.

Badema Pitic, PhD
Visual History Archive Program Coordinator

Badema Pitic is the Visual History Archive Program Coordinator at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Badema earned her PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA in 2017. She worked as a Curator at the Department of Ethnology of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and obtained her BA and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Sarajevo before moving to the United States. Prior to her appointment at the Center, Badema worked as a Lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts, and was also a publications coordinator for the UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications and an archive assistant at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. Badema’s research focuses on the intersections of music, memory, and politics in the aftermath of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Marika Stanford-Moore, MA
Assistant Program Coordinator

Marika Stanford-Moore is the Assistant Program Coordinator at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research. As an anthropologist and filmmaker, Marika holds a Masters degree in Visual Anthropology (documentary filmmaking) from USC. She documents the values and practices of alternative birthing in Los Angeles. Her first documentary film, Dance of Three, is a 30-minute visual ethnography focusing on a couple’s home birthing process, with the support of a doula (non-medical birth coach). Marika’s passion for reproductive justice and women’s health have drawn her to the storytelling nature of documentary film. In the past, she has worked for environmental nonprofit Grades of Green, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and production company Planet C Studios. When she’s not working at the Shoah Foundation, Marika can be found serving as an abortion doula or teaching yoga. 

Martha Stroud, PhD
Associate Director and Senior Research Officer

Martha Stroud is the Associate Director and Senior Research Officer at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research. An anthropologist with special interests in the anthropology of genocide, psychological anthropology, and Indonesia, Martha earned her PhD in medical anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2015. Martha’s research focuses on the Indonesian mass killings and detentions of 1965-1966 and their aftermath. In her doctoral research, which entailed over two years of fieldwork in Java, Martha explored the ways in which the events of 1965-1966 continue to emerge in daily life in Indonesia today, 50 years after the killings first began.