Victoria Sanford Awarded 2024-2025 Center Research Fellowship

Victoria Sanford, PhD, Lehman Professor of Excellence in the Department of Anthropology at Lehman College, has been awarded the Center Research Fellowship at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. She will be in residence at USC during the Spring 2025 semester.

During her residency, Professor Sanford will conduct research in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA), focusing on the testimonies of Guatemalan genocide survivors. In addition to conducting research about Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPRs), where internally displaced people lived in hiding in war zones in the 1980s and 1990s, she will also examine oral histories from the Ixcan Area, Pelten, some regarding disappearances from CPRs. She plans to explore how these communities rebuilt their lives in the face of ongoing conflict, as well as how these experiences continue to shape the peace building process in the region.

Professor Sanford’s research interests include genocide, human rights, femicide, Indigenous rights to ancestral lands, displacement, and migration. She is the author of seven books, including the most recently published Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice (UC Press, 2023) and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), as well as dozens of journal articles and book chapters. She has conducted research in Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia. She co-organized the international conference “A ‘Conflict’? Genocide and Resistance in Guatemala” with the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2016.

Professor Sanford earned her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University. She holds a Certificate in International Human Rights Law from the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica. In addition to her position at Lehman College, she is a doctoral faculty member of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was the Founding Director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She has been awarded many esteemed fellowships throughout her career, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bunting Peace Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Scholar award for a residency at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, among others.

She is a board member for several organizations related to human rights and genocide studies, including the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the City University of New York and Reiff Center for Human Rights & Conflict Resolution at Christopher Newport University. As part of her commitment to public anthropology, Professor Sanford was an invited expert witness in the Spanish National Court’s genocide case against the Guatemalan generals and in an indigenous land rights case in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

The Center Research Fellowship enables one senior scholar from any discipline to spend a semester in residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research to use the Visual History Archive and related unique research resources at USC for innovative projects. Read more about past Center Research Fellows here.