All of USC Shoah Foundation’s educational resources about the Armenian Genocide can now be found in a new one-stop shop on the IWitness website that launched today, one week before the 102nd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

USC Shoah Foundation was featured at the USC Institute of Armenian Studies’ Innovate Armenia festival for the first time on Saturday.

USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the USC Institute of Armenian Studies will co-host a public lecture by Boris Adjemian, director of Paris’s AGBU Nubar Library, on Monday, Oct. 16.

In the immediate aftermath of the Armenian genocide, thousands of Armenian survivors recorded testimonies detailing the atrocities they witnessed at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during World War I. And yet it wouldn’t be until the 1990s before historians would begin taking these oral histories seriously.

IWitness has gathered a variety of multimedia resources to help teachers teach and students learn about the new film The Promise, a historical fiction film that conveys a multi-perspective history of the Armenian Genocide.

USC Shoah Foundation launched the first in a series of educational activities developed in partnership with the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU). The series incorporates testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors and their descendants with supplementary videos from AGBU WebTalks, and is available to students through the Institute’s award-winning educational website, IWitness.

Although the Armenian Genocide is recognized in states and cities across the country, the issue remains unresolved on the national level. During a talk on April 19, Julien Zarifian outlined several reasons why the issue remains thorny in Washington D.C., more than 100 years after the genocide that left more than 1 million Armenians slaughtered.

Education and Outreach Specialist Sedda Antekelian and Program Officer Manuk Avedikyan shared information about the educational use of testimony in the Institute’s Visual History Archive and on the Institute’s educational website, IWitness.

USC Shoah Foundation is joining forces with The Genocide Education Project, which is dedicated to bringing curriculum about the World War I-era Armenian Genocide into high schools across the United States.

My life and my work at USC Shoah Foundation are strongly connected to the joys and the sorrows of the Armenian community. Thus, I was both shocked and heartened by recent separate events that demonstrated how far we’ve come in advancing human dignity and how far we still have to go.

Roughly 1,000 audio-only interviews recorded by students of UCLA history Professor Richard Hovannisian were entrusted to USC Shoah Foundation. This week, Hovannisian and three of his former students gave a talk about how they amassed such a large repository of memory at so crucial a time, “when denialism was huge.”

The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will feature full access to the public of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA) of over 54,000 testimonies. One of the world’s leading Armenian Studies centers, NAASR advances education and scholarship through supporting and connecting scholars globally and providing outstanding programming to the general public.  NAASR plans to conduct outreach with schools, colleges, libraries, and other institutions in order to spread awareness about the availability of the VHA at NAASR’s headquarters.

In 1985, when Dr. Sharon Aroian-Poiser was a graduate student, she accompanied her grandfather to Washington D.C., to a conference commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Between 1915 and 1918, the Turkish government systematically expelled or massacred an estimated 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Aroian-Poiser watched as elderly survivors at the conference rose to tell their stories before microphones and video recorders, many of them for the first time. It was, in fact, the first time that Aroian-Poiser learned that her grandfather was a survivor.

‘Dimensions in Testimony Education’ is the first version of the groundbreaking technology available for instruction in classrooms around the world. Teachers and students can ask questions that prompt real-time response from a pre-recorded video of Pinchas—engaging in virtual conversation and redefining inquiry-based education.

USC Shoah Foundation has added 132 testimonies to its Visual History Archive. These firsthand accounts of mass atrocities spanning more than 100 years are now available to researchers, educators, family members, and the public.

When the Coronavirus pandemic banished students and teachers from classrooms in March 2020, Liza Manoyan scrambled to shift to distance learning. Figuring out the technology was one thing. But she faced another challenge. “There are not a lot of digital resources for teaching in Armenian,” she said.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute Foundation (AGMI) in Yerevan have launched a new partnership to develop programming to extend the reach of their collections, research and education initiatives using testimony related to the 1915 Ottoman campaign that murdered 1.5 million Armenians.