Professor Richard Hovannisian, Armenian Genocide Expert, To Visit USC Shoah Foundation

UCLA emeritus professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History Richard Hovannisian will meet with staff at USC Shoah Foundation on September 17. He will discuss the history of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the denial it has faced in a “Lunch and Learn” conversation open to all staff members.

Hovannisian has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1962 and was appointed its first Armenian Educational Foundation Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History in 1987. In 1969, he created the UCLA Armenian Genocide Oral History Project, in which his students would, over the next 40 years, interview more than 800 survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The interviews are now digitized and transcribed.

A Guggenheim Fellow who has received numerous honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and advancement of Armenian Studies, Hovannisian serves on the board of directors of several organizations, including Facing History and Ourselves Foundation, the International Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, and the Armenian National Institute (ANI). He has authored numerous books and scholarly articles about Armenian history and Near Eastern culture and is the founder of the Society for Armenian Studies. Hovannisian was honored by the president of the Republic of Armenia with the Movses Khorenatsi medal in 1998 and by the president of Artsakh with the Republic's Medal of St. Mesrop Mashtots in 2002.

In June, USC Shoah Foundation announced its goal to integrate the 400 interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors collected by the late Dr. J. Michael Hagopian into its Visual History Archive by 2015, the 100th anniversary of the genocide. The Visual History Archive contains 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides conducted in 57 countries and 33 languages.