“Filming the Camps” explores the World War II experiences of Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens and Samuel Fuller.

Martha Stroud, PhD, is the Associate Director and Senior Research Officer of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She manages the day-to-day operations of the Center, which advances innovative interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides and promotes use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. She joined the Center in 2015 after earning her PhD in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

After a long period of neglect, the study of genocides against Indigenous populations is becoming an increasingly larger part of the field of genocide studies.

McBride will first give a lunchtime workshop on how to use the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. At 7 p.m., he will give a lecture "Of course, they were Neighbors": Testimony, Archives and the Holocaust in Ukraine.” Both will be held at Belk Library and Information Commons room 114.

Hilda Mantelmacher’s life features many defining moments, yet three in particular stand apart from the rest: going through the Holocaust; an episode of 60 Minutes; and the film Schindler’s List.

Testimonies from the Visual History Archive’s newest collection have been added to IWitness in time for the upcoming school year along with a Mini Quest multimedia activity.

​Four years after completing a visiting fellowship at USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Jeffrey Shandler’s extensive research into the Visual History Archive has culminated in a new book.

Holocaust survivor Alexander Van Kollem recalls when stationed as an American soldier in Virginia during the Korean War his first encounter with institutionalized racism as he attempted to take a public bus.

At the behest of his father, 17-year-old Erwin Rautenberg boarded a steamer for South America in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany. His brother, sister, and parents planned to join him, but never made it. His father died in 1938, soon after being
forced into the German army. The rest of the family was killed during the Holocaust.

One year after the Future of Storytelling Festival exhibited USC Shoah Foundation’s New Dimensions in Testimony, Gustman has been invited back to give a talk at the 2017 Future of Storytelling Summit on October 4-5.

The film will be exhibited as part of the festival’s first-ever competition for films made in virtual reality.

Blake Humphrey is the Student Body President at West Virginia University and a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Intercollegiate Diversity Congress. He will be participating in the upcoming Intercollegiate Diversity Congress Summit at USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles this October.

When I visited Nazi death camps in 2014, I viewed spaces filled with the spirits of so many lives lost and witnessed the end result of evil, intolerance, and hatred. I left the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Majdanek that summer thinking that the sick, twisted ideology that drove the Nazis and was fueled by hatred and ignorance no longer existed in the 21st Century, especially in the United States. I naively believed Nazi ideology had ceased to exist with the end of World War II and the Holocaust.

Kurt Messerschmidt remembers the role of bystanders and explains the importance of standing up to injustice.

Armed with insights gathered during her two-week research trip to USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Maria Rita Corticelli is ready to begin building an archive of testimonies of minority groups who have experienced various forms of mass violence, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Iraq. “It’s something that is absolutely missing because there is nothing on Iraq regarding genocides committed there, not only the last one by ISIS but the ones committed before,” Corticelli said. “There is no centralized database where these testimonies are together.”

Less than a week after the neo-Nazi rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, USC Shoah Foundation received a call from Blake Humphrey, student body president of West Virginia University. How could he work with USC Shoah Foundation to speak out against this blatant display of hatred and bigotry?

Much of the content is geared toward addressing some of the many conflicts that came to light during and in the wake of the neo-Nazi, white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 15, 2017, such as the importance of speaking out against hate, promoting tolerance and acceptance, and embracing diversity.

The initiative will support educators by providing them with tools and training to responsibly engage their students now and into the future.

LOS ANGELES - Aug. 22, 2017 – The violent antisemitic and racist hatred seen in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month combined Nazi ideology with white supremacy and drew from the dark historical legacies of the Holocaust and slavery. This hatred revealed the fissures of a long-standing American cultural and identity crisis that requires long-term strategies to provide safe ways to explore identity and difference.

Another group of talented students has completed their applied math research project as part of UCLA Institute for Applied Mathematics (IPAM)’s Research in Industrial Projects (RIPS) summer program, offering USC Shoah Foundation staff options for improving the functionality of the Visual History Archive

Three graduates of USC Shoah Foundation’s Master Teacher program in Central Europe traveled to Los Angeles this week for additional training to take their use of IWitness and testimony to the next level.

For Board of Councilors Chair Emeritus Robert J. Katz, involvement with USC Shoah Foundation stems not from a direct personal connection, but from an emotional pull he later identified.


USC Shoah Foundation and USC Center for Excellence in Teaching welcome proposals from faculty who will integrate USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) and IWitness into a Spring 2018 course.

Margot talks about her friendship with the young son of a diplomat on her voyage from Germany to the United States.

The 2017-2018 Interdisciplinary Research Week at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research has come to a close, but for the seven scholars who were awarded this year’s fellowship, the work is just beginning.

For the last four years, I have had the incredible opportunity to share the story of USC Shoah Foundation. I joined the communications team in July 2013 to manage the social media accounts for the Institute. I was excited to work at such an esteemed institution that was making a difference in the world.

The grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, Aliza Liberman wonders whether her children will feel as connected to its horrors and lessons as she does. As a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s Next Generation Council, Liberman is doing what she can to ensure future generations feel that bond by supporting the Institute’s mission. From a young age, the Holocaust was part of her life. “The
fact that my grandfather never talked much about his life and his family in Poland always moved me to know more,” Liberman says.

On August 24, 2017, scholars from Latin America presented their initial findings on their use of the Visual History Archive and mapped out potential avenues of inquiry focusing on Holocaust survivors who eventually settled in Latin America. This presentation is one of the outcomes of a "scholar in residence" fellowship that brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to collaborate on a research project at USC for Interdisciplinary Research Week.

Zelizer will use her fellowship to teach a Ph.D. research seminar entitled “Mediating War and Genocide Through Visual Memory.”

Longtime Visual History Archive user Professor Therkel Straede took his use of testimony one step further last semester by giving his students an assignment to construct their own videos in IWitness, with inspiring results.