2026 Scheidt Graduate Research Fellowship Awarded to Haley Zovickian

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research has awarded its 2026 Charles E. Scheidt Graduate Research Fellowship to Haley Zovickian, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Southern California.

The Charles E. Scheidt Graduate Research Fellowship provides support for USC PhD students from any discipline to conduct research in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research – usually part-time for two semesters – focusing on the unique research resources in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at USC, including the Holocaust and Genocide Studies book collection, the Special Collections at USC Libraries, and the Visual History Archive.

During her fellowship, Zovickian will investigate survivor testimonies in the Visual History Archive to examine how genocide survivor communities and their descendants remember and narrate the enduring consequences of mass violence across generations. She is particularly interested in how narratives of violence are shaped over time, how they become institutionalized or challenged, and how they influence identity formation and community self-understanding in the present. Her comparative approach seeks to illuminate both the shared and distinctive ways communities continue to live with the consequences of genocide long after the violence has ended.

Zovickian brings extensive experience in genocide and memory studies to the fellowship. Before beginning her doctoral studies at USC, she earned a Master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University, where her thesis examined how the Armenian Genocide and its denial continue to shape contemporary Armenian-American identity. She earned her B.A. in Human Rights and Political Science from Columbia University. While at Columbia, she was awarded with the Myra Kraft Prize for Exceptional Practical Human Rights Advocacy and received an undergraduate Human Rights Internship Prize.

Haley’s past research experience includes work as a qualitative research assistant on a project spearheaded by the Business School and Department of Sociology at Columbia University. She also conducted individual research at the Center for Gender Studies at Yerevan State University in Armenia, focusing on domestic violence, poverty, and gender norms in Armenia’s post-Soviet landscape. She has worked as a staff writer for HuffPost and was selected as a fellow at BuzzFeed, experiences that strengthened her commitment to bringing rigorous scholarship into public conversations.

Listen to her discuss her research here.