“Makeshift Murder: The Holocaust at Its Peak”

Peter Hayes (Northwestern University)

2019-2020 Shapiro Scholar in Residence

March 5, 2020

“Geographies of Persecution in Occupied Paris: Place and Space in Survivors' Testimonies”

Maël Le Noc (PhD Candidate in Geography, Texas State University)

2019-2020 Margee and Douglas Greenberg Research Fellow

March 12, 2020

I much enjoyed my stay at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in early March, just before the pandemic turned all of our lives upside down. Meeting the wonderful members of the staff and seeing how much the operations of both the Foundation and the Center have grown since my last visit in 2014 were remarkable experiences.

Only a day after the University of Southern California announced that it would conduct a three-day test to move all classes online, which soon turned into a permanent arrangement until the end of Spring semester, my colleague and I gave our last in-person introduction to the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive to a USC class. Perhaps serendipitously, one of the topics discussed in this class was physical health.

The USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosted professors Marianne Hirsch (Columbia University) and Leo Spitzer (Dartmouth College), who gave a lecture based on their recently published book School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference.

From the Annals of Krakow, a sequence of poems by Piotr Florczyk that was inspired by testimonies from the USC Shoah Foundation Visual Archive, will be published in September 2020 by Lynx House Press, a press whose titles are distributed to the trade by University of Washington Press. 

Ioanida Costache, the Center’s 2019-2020 Breslauer, Rutman, and Anderson Research Fellow, gave a public lecture about the monthlong research she conducted in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive during her residency at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. This research is part of her ongoing dissertation project that examines how music helps facilitate the cultivation and transmission of Romani memories of the Holocaust.