Robson Bello visited the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in March 2023 as a Visiting Scholar. He earned his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD degrees in Social History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation is entitled "The Playground of the Past: Videogames and the Reification of Memory, Play, and the American West" ("O Playground do Passado: Videogame e a reificação da Memória, do Lúdico e do Oeste Americano").

In this blog, Center visiting scholar Robson Bello discusses his focus on play during his month of research. 

In this talk, Renana Keydar and Eitan Wagner examine the meeting point between testimony and computation, the new possibilities inherent in such an encounter and the challenges and risks involved. They introduce the new avenues for listening to the multitude of testimonies in the archives afforded by the development of advanced computational tools. The talk presents a computational model of "distant listening," which is motivated by the moral commitment to the integrity of each testimony while simultaneously approaching the multiplicity of testimonies as such.

USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Marta (Weiss) Wise, who was ten years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz, having endured the medical torture of Josef Mengele, along with her sister, Eva (Weiss) Slonim. She was 88. Marta and Eva were among a group of children pictured in a photograph—a still from a film shot by a Soviet cameraman soon after the liberation of Auschwitz—that became an iconic image of the horrors of the death camp where nearly one million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

Marta describes an instance of Holocaust denial which occurred at a school where she spoke.

USC Shoah Foundation in partnership with Aspen Film cordially invite you to a special screening of Remember This starring Academy Award-nominee David Strathairn

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research will cohost the 17th biennial Lessons & Legacies conference, which will take place at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Southern California from November 14 to November 17, 2024. Organized and sponsored by the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) in partnership with host universities, the biennial Lessons & Legacies of the Holocaust Conference (popularly known as Lessons & Legacies) is the premier international scholarly gathering in Holocaust Studies.

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is delighted to announce the upcoming publication of the book Resisters: How Ordinary Jews Fought Persecution in Hitler's Germany. Authored by Center Founding Director Wolf Gruner, the book will be published by Yale University Press on August 29, 2023.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Thomas Buergenthal, one of the youngest known survivors of Auschwitz, who later became an esteemed human rights attorney and United States representative on the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Thomas passed away on May 29, 2023, in Miami, Florida. He was 89.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the June 6, 2023 passing of Joshua Kaufman, who survived Auschwitz and was liberated at Dachau Concentration Camp at the age of 17, and was recognized at the 2019 State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. He was 95.

The USC Shoah Foundation mourns the passing of Damas Gisimba, the director of a Kigali orphanage who sheltered and saved the lives of over 400 people, mostly children, during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Later in life, he headed the Gisimba Memorial Center, a charitable organization that provided after-school programs for disadvantaged children and served as a place of remembrance for victims of the genocide.

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.

An online lecture by Alexandra Szabó (PhD candidate in History, Brandeis University) 2022-2023 Strauss Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Visiting scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Summer 2023

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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.

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.