Preserving History: Armenian Voices from the Classroom to the Archive

Saturday, June 1, 2019 - 05:00 AM PDT

A public lecture by Richard G. Hovannisian (Professor Emeritus, UCLA)
with commentary by Lorna Touryan Miller, Tamar Mashigian, and Salpi Ghazarian

Co-sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Dornsife Institute of Armenian Studies

"Preserving History: Armenian Voices from the Classroom to Archive" - Public lecture by Richard Hovannisian (Professor Emeritus of History, UCLA)

Professor Hovannisian presented on the history of his Armenian Genocide Oral History collection, which is today part of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. Considering that this collection was created as part of two courses that Professor Hovannisian taught at UCLA over five decades, three of his former students – Salpi Ghazarian, Tamar Mashigian, and Lorna Tourian Miller – also spoke about their experiences of conducting interviews with Armenian genocide survivors.

This lecture will feature Professor Richard Hovannisian and his Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection. During his more than fifty years of teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles, Hovannisian created a course in the 1970s on Armenian Oral History, in which he trained students to interview survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Over the years, some 1,000 interviews have been conducted, becoming the largest collection of its kind in existence. In 2018, the Richard Hovannisian Collection was entrusted to the Shoah Foundation at USC for preservation and academic and scholarly research. In this lecture, Hovannisian will discuss the origins and development of his course at UCLA, as well the uses and potential misuses of oral testimony. His former students Lorna Touryan Miller, Tamar Mashigian and Salpi Ghazarian will share their own impressions and experiences in adding to the collection. 

Richard G. Hovannisan is Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA. He received his B.A. in History from UC Berkeley and his M.A. and PhD from UCLA. He founded UCLA’s undergraduate and graduate programs in Armenian history and Armenian Holocaust. He is the author of Armenia on the Road to Independence (1967), The Republic of Armenia, Volumes I-IV (1971-1996),  and The Armenian Holocaust (1980). He is a Guggenheim Fellow and serves on the board of directors of organizations including Facing History and Ourselves, the International Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide and the Society for Armenian Studies, which he also co-founded.

Lunch will be served. RSVP to [email protected].