Arshag Dickranian had a happy childhood. The son of a wealthy Armenian merchant who worked in clothing manufacturing, Dickranian grew up in Adapazari, Turkey, home to around 20,000 Armenians. The diverse city was home to Greeks, Jews, and Turks as well as Armenians — all of whom peacefully coexisted.Then, when he was 10, everything changed. His family, and all the other Armenians in the city, were forced to travel through Turkey, toward Syria in what has now become known as the Armenian Genocide.

 Despite the fact that Aida Fogel grew up in Caracas, Venezuela, she was familiar with USC Shoah Foundation from an early age. A family friend worked with the Institute to interview survivors in Venezuela, and two of Fogel’s great-aunts gave testimony. Though her grandmother didn’t give testimony, she was an Auschwitz survivor herself.

USC junior Nisha Kale combined her dual interests in neuroscience and history to begin work on a multidisciplinary research project as USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s DEFY Undergraduate Summer Research Fellow. Kale, a double major in Neuroscience and Law, History and Culture, said she applied to the DEFY Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which provides support for a USC undergraduate to conduct research in the Visual History Archive at USC Shoah Foundation for one month, because it would allow her to combine her admittedly contrasting interests.

People who want to visit the places where the Holocaust happened have many options: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Shoes on the Danube Memorial in Budapest, former ghettos, or the fields of Babi Yar, to name a few.But when it comes to the Armenian Genocide, former sites of the massacres and killings are so difficult to access most people have never been there or even seen them in pictures.That’s what photographer Bardig Kouyoumdjian attempted to change with his book Deir-Zor: On the trail of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research will host the international conference “A Conflict? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala,” at the University of Southern California, Sept. 11-14, 2016. The scholars profiled in this series were each selected to present their research at the conference.Silvia Posocco, lecturer in the departments of Psychosocial Studies, and History and Philosophy at the University of London, will speak about the transnational movement of children from Guatemala to Europe during the 1980s at the conference.

Priscilla Hefley, a master’s student in the USC School of Social Work, knew she wanted to do research on trauma and its impact on the brain, but she had no idea where to start – until her professor Hazel Atuel suggested she look in USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Though Koko Mazloumian was an Armenian in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide, he and his family escaped persecution due to their close ties with some of the Ottoman leadership. Mazloumian’s family ran the storied Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria. Despite the fact that most other places they were massacring Armenians, the Turkish army adopted the hotel — which also had a mostly Armenian staff — as a sort of informal headquarters.

As the facilitator of the most recent Echoes and Reflections Online Professional Development course, Esther Hurh helped introduce over two dozen teachers to teaching with testimony for the first time. Hurh has worked with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in a variety of roles for over 15 years, including as the director of training and curriculum development in ADL’s education department. She is currently an education and curriculum consultant for Echoes and Reflections, ADL and other education and advocacy groups.

Jason Hensely’s project to interview Kindertransport survivors who were taken in by Christadelphians during World War II began with an Echoes and Reflections online professional development course.

After seeing the film “The Secret of Kells,” San Francisco State University student Collin Searls knew he wanted to create an animated movie in a similar vein for his thesis project. He didn’t have to look too far for inspiration on the subject. Searls decided to create a documentary-style, partially animated film about his great-grandmother, Rose Kurek, who had survived the Holocaust. The film went on to win 2nd Place Student Animation in the 2016 ASIFA Spring Festival and help Searls earn his bachelor of arts degree.

Left: Evening to Benefit USC Shoah Foundation co-hosts Ken Ehrlich, Andy Friendly, and Sandra & Vin Scully   Inspired by last year’s historic Auschwitz: The Past is Present program, producer Andy Friendly is taking his tradition of remembrance to heart by joining the USC Shoah Foundation Board of Councilors.

USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is a tool that allows genocide survivors to tell their stories. But it isn’t their words that summer research fellow Erin Mizrahi is interested in; it’s their silence. Mizrahi, a fifth-year Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture Ph.D. student at USC, is studying silence as a theoretical approach through two very different subjects: sexual assault in performance art and the Holocaust.