In this talk, Maël Le Noc (PhD candidate, Texas State University, Geography) draws from testimonies and archival material related to anti-Jewish persecution in two Parisian neighborhoods, the Arts-et-Métiers and the Enfants-Rouges quarters, to discuss the ways in which antisemitic persecution affected urban life and changed familiar urban spaces into spaces of exclusion and genocide.

In this lecture, Professor Peter Hayes details how and why the Nazi regime managed to kill an unprecedented number of people with ferocious speed, yet without applying significant quantities of German personnel or resources.

Presenting their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer will discuss the role of school photography in three historical instances of incarceration of persecuted populations.

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.

By using case studies of camps in northern and southern Italy, this lecture shows how former Jewish refugees and local Italians have maintained and forgotten the memories these crumbling structures hold. It demonstrates that the struggle to preserve these old buildings is reminiscent in many ways of the struggle to preserve the lives and culture of the Jewish refugees who once lived inside them. 

In this lecture, Bieke Van Camp presented some of the findings of her ongoing doctoral research on social interaction and group survival strategies in the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. She explored how network analysis of Italian testimonies from the oral collections of the Visual History Archive and the Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea of Milan suggests that a very large majority of Italian Jews were deported initially to the same Nazi Lager (Birkenau) during a rather small lapse of time (October 1943 – 1945).

In this talk, Ayşenur Korkmaz explored how the survivors and their descendants reflect on their ‘place of origin’ and ex-social networks in the former Ottoman Empire. What did or does ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ mean to them when it no longer exists in the way that they imagine(d)? How do we make sense of their site of memories and imaginations of the material and relational ‘home,’ and everyday life before the genocide?

Professor Marion Kaplan, 2018-2019 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, gave the annual Shapiro Scholar public lecture on gender and the Holocaust.

Professor Hovannisian presented on the history of his Armenian Genocide Oral History collection, which is today part of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. Considering that this collection was created as part of two courses that Professor Hovannisian taught at UCLA over five decades, three of his former students – Salpi Ghazarian, Tamar Mashigian, and Lorna Tourian Miller – also spoke about their experiences of conducting interviews with Armenian genocide survivors.

A unique feature of the Armenian Genocide has been the long-standing efforts of successive Turkish governments to deny its historicity and to hide the documentary evidence surrounding it. Denialists have claimed that there was no central decision taken by Ottoman authorities to exterminate the Armenians and that all available documents that indicate otherwise are either fake or were doctored by Armenians.

This lecture offered an examination of pro-state paramilitary violence in the Syrian conflict. It analyzed the emergence and transformation of pro-state paramilitarism in Syria in the context of the uprising and civil war. 

In this lecture, Gabór Tóth discussed the ways text and data mining technology has helped to recover fragments of lost experiences of Nazi persecution out of oral history interviews with survivors. He also demonstrated how a data-driven anthology of these fragments has been built.

In this lecture, Professor Peter Hayes detailed how and why the Nazi regime managed to kill an unprecedented number of people with ferocious speed, yet without applying significant quantities of German personnel or resources.

In this webinar, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research team will provide a deep dive into the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, including its history; methodologies of testimony collection, preservation, and indexing; current state of the archive and its collections; and how to use its search engines and interface for research and teaching. The participants will learn how to unlock the research potential of the archive and be able to ask questions and get assistance with effectively searching the archive.