Research

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides.

Research Themes

The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research fosters research on all areas of Holocaust and genocide studies research and focuses its activities on three central research themes:

Resistance to Genocide
To study conditions and factors – historically and contemporarily – that enable people, groups and societies to slow down or stop the course of mass violence. Here, the Center focuses on acts of resistance that inhibit the impact of genocidal ideology and/or defy its policies.
Violence, Emotion, and Behavioral Change
To explore the nature of mass violence and its emotional, social, psychological, historical and physical impacts on individual behavior, and to deepen the understanding of the individual experience as reflected in personal testimonies of survivors, witnesses and perpetrators. The Center advances the application of such knowledge in fostering behavior and/or behavioral change in resisting mass violence.
Digital Genocide Studies
To examine how large digital data sets, such as the fully indexed 55,000 video testimonies of USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, can be used for a sophisticated analysis of complex human phenomena. The Center seeks to establish patterns of behavior in the field of mass violence and resistance to mass violence.

Current Research

#LastSeen – Pictures of Nazi Deportations

The Center searches for unknown photographs of Nazi mass deportations.

Photos of Nazi mass deportations have never before been brought together, made available as a collection, and analyzed collectively in any systematic way. Nor has there been a concerted effort to search for more photos. The USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research is part of a German government funded multi-institutional Holocaust research project, launched in November 2021, which aims to gather, analyze, and digitally publish pictures of Nazi mass deportations of Jews, Romani people and people with disabilities from the German Reich between 1938 and 1945. Knowing these pictures tell many stories – of the deportees, the perpetrators, and the spectators – this initiative invites the public’s participation in helping us to discover and analyze previously unknown photographs that survive in museums, archives, private attics, basements, or dusty photo albums.