USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education has added a collection of testimonies of survivors and rescuers from the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi genocide to its Visual History Archive. This marks the first integration of testimonies outside of Holocaust survivors and witnesses into the Visual History Archive.

Dr. Jared McBride, 2014-2015 recipient of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research's Douglas and Margee Greenberg Research Fellowship discusses how oral history and testimony can be integrated with existing archival documents to recreate a micro-level history of the Holocaust in western Ukraine.

A public lecture by Irina Rebrova (Technische Universität Berlin) 2017-2018 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow

Dr. Johanna Braun, a researcher with the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and lecturer in the Department of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, will be conducting research as a visiting scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research for three months beginning in December 2021. 

USC Shoah Foundation’s latest quarterly stats update shows remarkable gains in its testimony access and academic and educational outreach over the past year.

Montreal, March 23, 2015 – As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of the Jews of Europe, the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC) and Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto are proud to announce an historic agreement with USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education to have their testimonies integrated in the Visual History Archive as part of the Institute’s Preserving the Legacy initiative.

While translating Armenian testimonies given in rare dialects, two families made surprise discoveries about their own family history.

USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education is readying at least 40 of the nearly 400 Armenian testimonies it has secured from the Armenian Film Foundation for inclusion in the Visual History Archive. It is anticipated the entire collection will be integrated by the fall of 2015.

Shandler’s talk will focus on Yiddish performances of Holocaust survivors in the Visual History Archive of USC Shoah Foundation.

Dr. Richard Hovannisian was one of the world’s foremost scholars of Armenian history and the Armenian Genocide. A child of survivors, he founded the Armenian Genocide Oral History Project at UCLA in 1969, recording interviews with more than 1,000 genocide survivors. He donated the collection to the USC Shoah Foundation in 2018.

Learning from eyewitnesses of some of history’s darkest moments, educators strive to teach the power of decency and respect.

Join us for this in-person event at the Institute for Armenian Studies on oral history and its implications. Organized in conjunction with the USC Dornsife Institute for Armenian Studies, the day will offer two panel discussions on the evolving place and role of oral history in the field of Armenian Studies.

In Nazi Germany, the medical field was part of the larger effort to dehumanize anyone who did not conform to the idea of a “healthy German nation.” Dr. Sabine Hildebrandt, who teaches the history of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, scrutinizes the biographies of medical professionals during the Nazi era and restores the histories of victims subjected to coercive medical experimentation both before and after death. Dr. Hildebrandt also considers the legacies of this history for the present, including how to ethically approach work with human remains in historical collections at universities, museums, and historical institutions.

The sense of history in the making was palpable Monday in Krakow, Poland, where more than 20 staff members of USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education attended a reception to honor more than 100 Auschwitz survivors on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp.

The testimonies of Holocaust survivors were recorded for the Visual History Archive 50 years after the Holocaust took place, but testimonies of more recent genocides are increasingly being collected. The Dynamics of Oral History of War and Genocide panel will examine the challenges, implications and responsibilities that modern testimony collections have for communities that have experienced war and genocide.

In the collective memory, the February Revolution has faded or been mixed with the October Revolution, which happened eight months later and defined the trajectory of the Russian history for the next 70 years. However, the memory of the February Revolution is preserved in several eyewitness testimonies to the Holocaust in the Visual History Archive.

Opening even held in early November.

USC President Carol L. Folt and scholars from USC and beyond gathered at the global headquarters of USC Shoah Foundation on November 11 for the public launch of the redesigned Visual History Archive, the world’s largest collection of primary source video testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides. 

A pilot collection of 20 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1995 genocide that took place in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been added to USC Shoah Foundation’s 55,000-strong Visual History Archive (VHA) thanks to a new collaboration with the Srebrenica Memorial Center. 

Doctoral candidates can conduct research in the Visual History Archive through three endowed fellowships. The application deadline is December 15, 2016.

Welcome to Through Testimony, the official blog of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Attendees from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Ukraine.

Each webinar focuses on a specific aspect of teaching using genocide survivor and witness testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

Students at the Ronald Lauder Jewish School in Prague debuted the short films they made using testimony from the Visual History Archive.

The second annual Robert J. Katz Research Fellow in Genocide Studies will be Kathryn Brackney, a Ph.D. candidate in history at Yale University.

USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is pleased to announce that Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), a university in Lyon, France, is the 51st institution, and the first in France, to gain full access to the Institute’s Visual History Archive, a repository of nearly 52,000 video testimonies from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.

​Four years after completing a visiting fellowship at USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Jeffrey Shandler’s extensive research into the Visual History Archive has culminated in a new book.

USC Shoah Foundation staff and partners will present the Visual History Archive and IWitness at a seminar and conference in Central Europe next week.

Ten Rwandan testimonies from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive are the latest additions to IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s interactive educational website.

Digital tools allow researchers from a variety of disciplines, including cartography, history and visual arts, to represent the Holocaust in new, exciting visual formats.