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.Heather Vrana’s presentation “H.I.J.O.S.: A New Politics and Memory Beyond Reconciliation” will focus on the next generation of activists in Guatemala.

One of USC Shoah Foundation’s biggest champions in Michigan is educator Sean McBrady, whose passion for IWitness resulted in a workshop for teachers in his district last week.McBrady first learned about IWitness in 2008 when he co-taught 9th grade world history and geography with a colleague who introduced him to USC Shoah Foundation and its testimonies and educational resources. The response from their students was “powerful,” he said, and they were excited to see IWitness continue to grow over the years.

Last summer, social studies teacher Amy Mclaughlin-Hatch went on trip with the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teacher’s Program to Germany and Poland, visiting 42 sites significant in the Holocaust. Now, with the help of IWitness, she’s bringing this knowledge back to her high school students at Southeastern Regional Vocational High School in South Easton, Massachusetts.

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. For her presentation at the conference, Morna Macleod will look back on her experiences working in human rights in the final years of the Guatemalan Genocide 30 years ago.

For public policy student Ge (Gina) Jin, coming all the way to Los Angeles from China for graduate school meant a lot of changes. Luckily, she found a community of like-minded people at USC Shoah Foundation.“As an international student, we always have a rough time getting used to life here in the United States,” she said. “So I think this is a really nice home.”What allowed Jin to feel so at home was the diverse group of people working at the Institute.

Denise Paluch had been to two concentration camps by the time she was four, when she was smuggled out and kept hidden with a false identity for years in occupied France. For a long time, she did not know what became of her parents and for over 50 years, she wondered what had happened to them and hoped against hope that they were still alive. Years later, the youngest of her four children, Gaby Eirew, has researched and made a free, video-recording question-prompting app to help all parents leave loving messages, information and support for their children for use after death.

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. Emilio del Valle Escalante will bring the indigenous Mayan perspective to the conference with his presentation about writer Sabino Esteban Francisco.

As a first year law student at the USC Gould School of Law, Roza Petrosyan has found that research is of the utmost importance.“You have to figure things out on your own a lot, and research is very important,” she said. “I think when you come in with a background in research, history in research, you’re very analytical and very detailed.”Luckily, Petrosyan had that background from her time interning at USC Shoah Foundation and doing research alongside Dr. Wolf Gruner, director of USC Shoah Foundation’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Discover some of the testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation's Armenian Genocide Collection.Levon Giridlian was just 10 years old when he saw 2,500 friends, family members, and neighbors massacred and thrown into a mass ditch.It was 1895, and he was in his hometown of Kayseri, Turkey. Giridlian, however, was not a Turk but rather an Armenian. The killings later became known as the Hamidian massacres, a chilling precursor to the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

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. Washington University postdoctoral teaching fellow Rebecca Clouser will examine genocide denial in Guatemala and how it impedes the country’s development in her presentation at the conference.

Aliza Caplan is about to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, but it wasn’t until her final semester of her undergraduate studies that she took one of her favorite courses: “Witnessing, Remembering, and Writing the Holocaust” with Professor Liliane Weissberg.

Rose Apelian was born in 1907 in New York to Armenian parents. Though both her parents had become American citizens since immigrating to the States, they decided to go back to their homeland in 1910 for property tax reasons.Unfortunately, neither of her parents would ever return.

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. Jorge Ramon Gonzalez-Ponciano will look back over one hundred years in Guatemala’s history to examine what he believes was one of the earliest triggers of the Guatemalan Genocide in the 1980s.

Ten years ago, Karen Haynie brought testimony from USC Shoah Foundation into her classroom by having her students gather around a single computer to watch the videos.

Glance at one of David Kassan’s artworks depicting Holocaust survivors Samuel Goldofsky or Elsa Ross and you might assume it’s a photograph. But look closer and the piece comes to life as an intricately detailed and stunningly realistic oil painting.

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. Roddy Brett’s research on the genocide in Guatemala began 24 years ago while he was working on his second master’s degree at Cambridge – a decision he made literally overnight.

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.

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. Batsabe Martinez Manzanero, a Ph.D. student in Social Anthropology at El Colegio de Michoacán, will speak about the Guatemalan Mayas who live in Mexico, specifically at a former refugee camp known as Maya Tecún.

When eighth-grader Allison Vandal saw a classmate run into the classroom crying, she did the best thing she could think of to help: She wrote the classmate a poem about the power of words. That simple act of kindness would soon grow into something much bigger. Along with her friends and classmates Maya Montell and Caroline Waters, Allison started the Poets Undercover Guild (PUG), a society at Readington Middle School in New Jersey where students give or receive poetry to each other to build an inclusive community within the school.