Ioanida Costache, a PhD Candidate in Music at Stanford University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Breslauer, Rutman and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

My life and my work at USC Shoah Foundation are strongly connected to the joys and the sorrows of the Armenian community. Thus, I was both shocked and heartened by recent separate events that demonstrated how far we’ve come in advancing human dignity and how far we still have to go.

Visit this page to watch the live-streamed event:

After months of beta testing with educators around the globe, USC Shoah Foundation is launching the brand new IWalk app, which offers 29 IWalks in seven countries and eight languages.

Anna Lee, the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave a public lecture about her research on survivor activism as a form of healing in the aftermath of mass executions during genocide and contemporary school mass shootings. During her one-month residency at the Center, Lee conducted comparative research on the topic by examining both survivor testimonies housed in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive and accounts of school shootings survivors found in media and other sources.

Maël LeNoc, a PhD Candidate in Geography at Texas State University, has been awarded the 2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education (USC Shoah Foundation) announced today the appointment of Lee Liberman as Chair of its Board of Councilors and Joel Citron as Vice Chair effective July 1, 2019. 

Professor Uğur Ümit Üngör (Utrecht University, Department of History, and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam) gave a public lecture about the role of paramilitary militias in cases of mass violence, focusing on the example of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. The lecture is based on Professor Üngör’s forthcoming monograph of the same title, which builds upon his broader and comparative research on the global phenomenon of paramilitarism.

Each year, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts an interdisciplinary team of scholars from different universities and different countries for one week so that they can develop and discuss a collaborative innovative research project in the field of Holocaust and Genocide

Dorothy Zoltek, a Warsaw Ghetto and Holocaust survivor, said she knew Emanuel Ringelblum's family well. She discusses their relationship in this testimony, recorded in 1985 by the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto. The testimony is stored in USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive.  

Amy B. Bloom, JD is a social studies/history educational consultant for Oakland Schools, a regional education service agency supporting 28 school districts in Oakland County, Michigan. She also serves as the Chair of the Executive Board for the Center for the Study of Citizenship at Wayne State University.

In December of 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military invaded Nanjing, China, and engaged in a campaign of mass killing. Some of the witnesses live on in our Nanjing collection.

If listening is a form of acknowledgment, can we hear the Roma? In this talk, Ioanida Costache (PhD candidate, Stanford University) problematizes the staggering silence and forgetting surrounding Romani persecution during the Holocaust, a history that has been muted or distorted for decades.

The Holocaust is not widely taught in Latin America. Few books on the subject are available in Spanish, and university classes that do touch on the history are sometimes outdated.

USC Shoah Foundation is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education and action. The Institute currently has over 57,466 testimonies recorded in 45 languages in 70 countries that allow us to see the faces and hear the voices of those who witnessed history, allowing them to teach, to memorialize, and to inspire.

Anna Lee, a junior at USC from Los Angeles, California majoring in English Literature with minors in Spanish and Teaching English as a Second language (TESOL), has been chosen as the 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

The largest audiovisual collection of its kind in the world, the Holocaust Collection is composed of over 54,000 WWII era testimonies of Jewish survivors, political prisoners, Sinti and Roma survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and gay male survivors, as well as rescuers and aid providers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials.

The Armenian Genocide testimony collections include several categories of individuals linked directly or indirectly to the calamity. The vast majority are Armenian Genocide survivors, while others are Armenian descendants (second and third generation), scholars, rescuers and aid providers, foreign witnesses, and Yezidi survivors, as well as Arab and Greek eyewitnesses. The interviews were recorded in 10 languages in 13 countries.

Ayşenur Korkmaz, the Center’s 2019-2020 Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, gave a public lecture about narratives and conceptions of home among Armenian genocide survivors who fled to the south Caucasus during the Armenian genocide. The lecture is based on Korkmaz’s research with video and audio testimonies of Armenian survivors available in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, and is part of her larger dissertation project on post-genocide articulations of the Armenian homeland (Yergir) through materiality and rituals.

In 1975, a communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge conquered the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The occupation set in motion a four-year campaign of genocide that would wipe out 2 million people – a quarter of the country’s population. Developed through a partnership between USC Shoah Foundation and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, the Cambodian Genocide Collection offers testimonies of survivors who escaped the killings from 1975 to 1979.

In August of 2017, the military and local collaborators in the Buddhist-majority Myanmar began violently driving Rohingya Muslims from their homes – destroying and looting villages; killing men, women and children; and raping women. The campaign killed at least 6,700 Rohingya and drove as many as 650,000 into refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. In November of 2017, a crew from USC Shoah Foundation spent time in the camps interviewing refugees.

 

Badema Pitic joined the Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2017, where she is involved in the Center's outreach and academic programming directed at fostering and supporting the scholarly use of the Visual History Archive in research and teaching. Badema earned her doctorate in Ethnomusicology from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, memory, and politics in the aftermath of war and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Their loved ones – including women and children – were slaughtered by the military and tossed into mass graves. For more than 30 years, survivors of the Guatemalan Genocide against the indigenous population assumed nobody cared about their stories. After all, nobody had ever bothered to ask.

This lecture offers an examination of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. It analyzes the emergence and transformation of pro-state paramilitarism in Syria in the context of the uprising and civil war. It focuses on the Syrian government’s deployment of the Shabbiha (later renamed ‘National Defense Forces’), irregular paramilitaries dressed in civilian gear and committing a broad spectrum of violence, including torture, kidnapping, assassination, sexual violence, and a string of massacres across the country.

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors.

Martha Stroud manages the day-to-day operations of the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, 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.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research invites research proposals from USC undergraduate students and USC graduate students for its 2019 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellowship.

Bieke Van Camp, the 2018-2019 Robert J.

Public lecture by Virginia Bullington (USC undergraduate, Narrative Studies)