Sarkis Miranian was born in 1908 or after in Yeghekis (present-day Göllü) in the current province of Bitlis, a village nestled in a valley on the southern shores of Lake Van. He describes the situation in his village right before the Genocide began in the Van region as well as the immediate impact it had on his family.  This audio clip is a part of the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection which is an audio only collection.

Svetlana Ushakova provides the service of research, annotation, and evaluation to the Dimensions in Testimony program. In 2014-2018, she worked at USC Shoah Foundation as an indexer and research assistant. Before she moved to the USA, she worked for ten years as a researcher at an academic institution in Russia and has several publications. Svetlana received her doctorate in Russian History from Novosibirsk State University, Russia, and her master in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.

USC Shoah Foundation's Karen Jungblut speaks at The Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide about the nearly 100 video interviews recorded in Bangladesh refugee camps.

Despite the testimony of many witnesses to his Nazi-era crimes, Walther Becker walked out of a German courtroom a free man. The judge in the case – who was later revealed to have his own Nazi sympathies – gave little credence to survivor testimony when he handed down his 1972 verdict.

In this lecture, Philippe Sands discusses his most recent book East West Street: On the Origins of 'Genocide' and 'Crimes Against Humanity' — part historical detective story, part family history, part legal thriller — to connect his work on 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide', the events that overwhelmed his family in Lviv during World War II, and the untold story at the heart of the Nuremberg trial that pits lawyers Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht against Hans Frank, defendant number 7, former Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland and Adolf Hitler's lawyer.

Lindsay is the Managing Director of Echoes & Reflections, the Institute's flagship Holocaust Education program in partnership with ADL and Yad Vashem. In this role, she leads strategic planning and the ongoing programmatic and operational oversight to ensure successful reach of goals and objectives of the Partnership. Lindsay holds an MEd from the University of Vermont and a BA in History from Northwestern University. She has held a range of leadership positions in the non-profit education field for more than 25 years. Lindsay is based outside of Chicago, IL.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students for its 2018 Summer Research Fellowships.

  Call for Papers: The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V: An International Conference and Workshop March 11-13, 2019  The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.  

“New Perspectives on Kristallnacht: After 80 Years, the Nazi Pogrom in Global Comparison” was an international conference held at USC. Organized by the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Casden Institute, the conference convened 22 scholars from all over the world — the United States, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

It’s a story my grandfather never told me, something that I only heard and understood later, years after my mother recounted it. In 1943, after his first wife and children were killed, my grandfather, Sam Wasserman, participated in one of the only successful mass escapes from a Nazi extermination camp. He and hundreds of other prisoners, overwhelmed and killed several guards and escaped the Sobibor death camp in Poland. My grandfather eluded capture, joined a band of partisans fighting the Nazis, and shortly after surviving the war, met the woman who would become my grandmother.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus (University of Manchester, United Kingdom) 2018-2019 Center Research Fellow “Corpses of the Holocaust” November 13, 2018

One student listened to the testimonies of those imprisoned at an internment camp. Another wrote about people stranded in the middle of the ocean attempting to escape the genocide in the Congo. Two others will act out a scene where two inmates of a concentration camp dream of the food they would eat if they were elsewhere. The class will read excerpts of the 10 plays at the Parkside Performance Cafe 3 p.m. Friday.

USC Shoah Foundation partners with CNN to share voices of Rohingya refugees.

Virginia Bullington, a sophomore at USC from Nantucket, Massachusetts majoring in American Studies and Narrative Studies, has been chosen as the first-ever Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Public lecture by Bieke Van Camp (PhD candidate, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France) 2018-2019 Katz Research Fellow

USC Shoah Foundation’s documentary about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre tells the story through the lens of a survivor’s relationship with her granddaughter and great-grandson.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for the inaugural Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.

Although the Armenian Genocide is recognized in states and cities across the country, the issue remains unresolved on the national level. During a talk on April 19, Julien Zarifian outlined several reasons why the issue remains thorny in Washington D.C., more than 100 years after the genocide that left more than 1 million Armenians slaughtered.

USC Shoah Foundation is saddened to learn of the passing of Claude Lanzmann, whose monumental film "Shoah" introduced a new way of telling the story of the Holocaust. He died in Paris on Tuesday. He was 92.   Born Nov. 27, 1925, in Paris to Jewish parents, Lanzmann went into hiding during World War II. At 17, he joined the French resistance.  

The event hosted by USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research appears to have been the only international academic conference to mark the 80th anniversary of this fateful event of November 1938, during which Nazis and ordinary Germans murdered more than 100 Jews and destroyed thousands of synagogues, Jewish institutions, stores and homes across Germany.

Inaugural Breslauer, Rutman & Anderson Research Fellow Diane Marie Amann gave a public lecture at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research about her research on the little-known women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.

Jennie Burnet, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University, gave a public lecture at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research focusing on the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influenced rescuer behavior during the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.

The on-location testimony of Ed Mosberg recounting the horrors he experienced at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria will be the second of its kind by USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute's first 360-degree testimony -- the critically acclaimed VR film "The Last Goodbye" -- takes viewers on a harrowing tour of the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.

Participants will become familiar with the various pathways of IWitness by navigating through the site with USC Shoah Foundation educators. Participants will take away strategies of best practices for accessing testimony-based resources on IWitness and will learn how to build their own digital classroom within the site. Register now! As a result of this webinar, participants will…

Sanna Stegmaier, a second-year joint PhD student in German Studies and Cultural Studies at King’s College, London and Humboldt University, Berlin, has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2018-2019 Center Graduate Research Fellowship competition at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will arrive at the Center for her two-week residency near the end of August and in addition to conducting research in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, she will consult with staff from the Dimensions in Testimony team.

Karen Painter, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities will be visiting the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research for one week this summer as Honorable Mention for the Center’s 2018-2019 International Teaching Fellowship.

Over six days, teachers from all over Poland learned how to best integrate USC Shoah Foundation's testimonies of genocide survivors into their classroom experiences.

At a time when the term “fake news” has become pervasive – and when rising nationalism worldwide has had an especially pronounced effect on Central Europe – USC Shoah Foundation’s representatives in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary are introducing high school students to a suite of new IWitness activities that use testimony to provide a deeper understanding of propaganda.

Julien Zarifian (University of Cergy-Pontoise, France) 2017-2018 Visiting Fulbright Scholar  “The United States and the Question of the Armenian Genocide” April 19, 2018

November 5-7, 2018 at the University of Southern California and Villa Aurora