When asked where he gets his generosity of spirit, Mickey Shapiro, USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors member, credits his parents, Holocaust survivors Sara and Asa Shapiro, and the deep respect he has for their resilience and all they achieved.

New Dimensions in Testimony has been a work of passion for USC Shoah Foundation since 2010. After years of development at the University of Southern California including with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and with content developer Conscience Display, the program is now reaching audiences in museums around the world.

“Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies” was the first international conference bringing the fields of digital humanities and genocide studies together. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and cosponsored by the USC Digital Humanities Program, the conference convened 23 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Poland, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.

Reflections on the recent conferences the USC Shoah Foundation hosted or participated in, and the ways in which these scholarly gatherings enrich the field of genocide studies and demonstrate the value of the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation launched the first in a series of educational activities developed in partnership with the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). The series incorporates testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors and their descendants with supplementary videos from AGBU WebTalks, and is available to students through the Institute’s award-winning educational website, IWitness.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites proposals for its 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship that will provide support for university and college faculty to integrate testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) into new or existing courses.

One feature of her research is examining the role of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive interviews in the construction of social memory of the Holocaust in the Soviet Jewish community and more widely in the post-Soviet society. During her month-long residency at the Center, Rebrova examined some of the USC Shoah Foundation’s institutional records about the selection, training, and methodology of interviewers in Russia.

Geraldien von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel, the 2017-2018 Center Research Fellow, gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Netherlands just before, during, and just after the Holocaust. In the lecture, Professor von Frijtag presented some of the preliminary conclusions from her four-month residency conducting research with testimonies housed in the Visual History Archive.

Renowned anthropologist Alexander Hinton gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about his new book Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer, which attempts to offer a deeper understanding of Comrade Duch, the notorious head of the S-21 prison, a notorious facility where between 12,000 and 20,000 people were detained, tortured, and ultimately murdered by the Khmer Rouge.