Kari Shagena is combining poetry and Holocaust survivor testimony to inspire empathy and action in her students following an IWitness seminar in Michigan last summer. Shagena, a language arts and social studies teacher at Richmond Middle School, was one of over dozen Michigan educators who attended USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness Summer Institute in Farmington Hills this past August, a three-day seminar that introduced educators to everything they need to know to incorporate testimonies and activities from IWitness into their classrooms.

For a historian, using a top-down approach is standard – you use government records, archives of primary and secondary sources to fulfill your research; you undress the documents and make sure they stand up, factually, and you stop there. But a bottom-up approach can provide a more complete image of an event, allowing those who lived through the time a voice in history.

Professor Omer Bartov, considered one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of the Holocaust, will serve as the 2016-2017 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. He will be in residence at the Center May 4-11, 2017, and will give a public lecture at USC on May 8.

Even after using testimony in her teaching and research for several years, Professor Shira Klein still discovered something new during her tenure as the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research 2016-2017 International Teaching Fellow. The annual International Teaching Fellowship is open to professors who wish to incorporate testimony into their courses and research. The chosen fellow has the opportunity to visit the Center and consult with its staff and gives a public lecture at USC about their work.