USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to invite applications from scholars of all levels for its Non-residential Scholar Program. The Program is intended to enable full access to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) to support scholarly research with survivor testimonies housed in the archive.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Richard G. Hovannisian, who was a close friend of the Center and passed away on July 10, 2023 at the age of 90 years old. 

Sedda Antekelian, a member of USC Shoah Foundation’s education team, never knew her own great grandmother had recorded testimony about surviving the Armenian Genocide. Hearing her great grandmother’s voice for the first time has brought Sedda closer to family, filled in gaps about her own history, and opened even more questions.

Christina Wirth, a Ph.D. student at the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, is to be the USC Shoah Foundation’s first Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Antisemitism Studies. She will be in residence at the Institute in April 2024.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of our friend Dr. Richard Gable Hovannisian, a scholar who devoted his life to chronicling the 1915 Armenian Genocide and donated the more than 1,000 survivor and witness testimonies he amassed to the USC Shoah Foundation. He was 90. Born to Armenian Genocide survivors in Tulare, California, in 1932, Dr. Hovannisian was initially discouraged from learning his parents’ language and knew little about Armenian history.

With anti-Jewish violence and rhetoric on the rise around the world, the USC Shoah Foundation this fall launches a new Antisemitism Lecture Series where leading scholars will guide audiences through the latest research on this persistent and shapeshifting bigotry.

USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launch an educational partnership dedicated to the study, teaching, and dissemination of Spanish-language Holocaust testimonies in Latin America. The new initiative, announced to coincide with Yom HaShoah, will undertake a range of innovative activities including the creation of a landing page on USC Shoah Foundation’s award-winning IWitness platform that will feature downloadable Spanish-language modules based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

Julie Fitzpatrick, a PhD candidate in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at the Center for a month from mid-October to mid-November 2023 to conduct research for her dissertation, which is currently entitled "‘Light the Candles and Lay the Table’: A Study on German-Jewish Women’s Relationship with Food During the Prewar, Wartime and Postwar Eras."

Carli Snyder is the 2022-2023 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies. Since the beginning of January, she has been in Los Angeles conducting research with Visual History Archive (VHA) testimonies. A PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, she is conducting research as part of her larger dissertation project that is provisionally entitled ‘Flesh of the Facts’: Toward a Feminist Holocaust Consciousness.

A longtime scholar affiliate of the USC Shoah Foundation has received a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to transcribe and translate the Maya-Kaqchikel and Spanish-language testimonies of survivors of the Guatemalan genocide.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education invites applications from graduate students from any university for the 2024-2025 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies.

Clara Dijkstra, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College, has been awarded the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in September 2023 to conduct research on the experiences of Jews and Roma (Tsiganes) in detention and internment camps in France during the Second World War.

Clara Dijkstra, a PhD candidate in History at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College, has been awarded the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies. She will be in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in September 2023 to conduct research on the experiences of Jews and Roma (Tsiganes) in detention and internment camps in France during the Second World War.

Alexandra Szabó, a PhD candidate in History at Brandeis University, has been awarded the 2023-2024 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be residence for a month during the Spring 2024 semester to conduct research for her dissertation, in which she investigates Hungarian Romani and Jewish women’s experiences of fertility abuses (failed pregnancies, miscarriages, sterilizations, postwar infertility) in the shadow of Nazi persecution.

In early September, Clara Dijkstra, a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Cambridge and the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies, arrived for her monthlong residency at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research (CAGR) to conduct research in the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation invites applications from advanced-level PhD candidates for the 2023-2024 USC Shoah Foundation Robert J. Katz Research Fellowship in Antisemitism Studies.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the December 7, 2022 passing of Tom Tugend, a Berlin-born veteran of three wars and an award-winning journalist who fled the Nazi regime just months ahead of the outbreak of World War II. He was 97. 

Professor Jan Grabowski, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust in Poland will serve as the 2022-2023 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture, entitled "Holocaust in Poland: New Research, New Findings", and spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in March 2023.

Professor Jan Grabowski, a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust in Poland will serve as the 2022-2023 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Shoah Foundation. He will deliver the Annual Sara and Asa Shapiro Lecture, entitled "Holocaust in Poland: New Research, New Findings", and spend a week in residence at the Center and USC Shoah Foundation in March 2023.

Suzette Sheft first recognized the importance of recording family history when it was already too late. As a young child, the New York City student had regularly listened to her father’s stories, but when he died of pancreatic cancer when she was just 13, she realized she was unable to remember many of them. “When he was alive, he would tell me stories about his life while tucking me in each night, but in the months following his death, I found myself forgetting many of his recollections,” Suzette said.

Gerald Szames chokes up easily, especially when talking about his mother. So for years, his daughter has taken it upon herself to tell her father’s story of surviving the Holocaust as a small boy. She speaks to audiences at schools, houses of worship and community centers, often with her father by her side to answer questions. 

April 8 is International Roma Day, an opportunity to celebrate the Romani and Sinti culture and raise awareness about the challenges faced by Europe’s largest ethnic minority. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Europe’s Roma and Sinti population was killed by the Nazis and their Axis partners during World War Two, a genocide with impacts that reverberate through the community today.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is one of the conveners for the conference "Archives in/of Transit: Historical Perspectives from the 1930s to the Present", which will take place at the University of Southern California from June 28 to June 29, 2024.

They have gathered on living room sofas, on university lawns, in synagogue sanctuaries, in public squares, and even in embassy conference rooms for intimate conversations that have a resounding global impact. Since 2011, more than 2 million people have met with Holocaust survivors to learn about their experiences and to help carry their histories and their hopes into the future.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research mourns the death of Kim Simon who for the last decade served as Managing Director of the USC Shoah Foundation. She passed away on February 28, 2023.

This December marks the 30th anniversary of the release of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award™-winning film that brought Holocaust remembrance to the forefront of popular culture. To commemorate the anniversary, the USC Shoah Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City are hosting a special panel discussion on November 5 to examine the impact and legacy of the film and its influence on the evolution of Holocaust history and memory.

As the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, many artists and intellectuals opposed to the regime sought refuge in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

The USC Shoah Foundation and The Latin American Network for Education on the Shoah (Red LAES) today launched a new IWitness web page that offers downloadable Spanish-language educational activities based on testimonies from the 56,000-strong Visual History Archive.

Middle and high school students around the world are exploring the themes of resistance, solidarity and resilience using an innovative new film-based curriculum produced by the USC Shoah Foundation and The Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, one of the first Holocaust museums in the world. 

A group of Bioethics and the Holocaust Fellows recently gathered at USC Shoah Foundation headquarters in Los Angeles to develop content for new curriculums that will feature Visual History Archive testimony from survivors of Nazi medical experiments. The Holocaust marked a profound and sadistic deviation from traditional notions of medical ethics, with medical and scientific communities in the Third Reich actively participating in the labeling, persecution and eventual mass murder of millions deemed “unfit.”