The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive at NAASR
NAASR’s Mardigian Library is home to a dedicated room where visiting researchers and the public have full access to the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive — over 60,000 audio and video testimonies of survivors and witnesses to genocide.
NAASR holds a perpetual subscription to the archive, which includes two major Armenian collections: the survivor interviews filmed by the Armenian Film Foundation and the Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection.
The Visual History Archive spans genocides and mass atrocities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Nanjing Massacre, the Guatemalan Genocide, anti-Rohingya mass violence, and the Cambodian Genocide, along with testimonies of survivors of the South Sudan Civil War and the Central African Republic Conflict, and more. NAASR created its viewing room in the Vartan Gregorian Building so that researchers, family members of survivors, and the public could view these eyewitness testimonies, study their historical contexts, and contribute to the goal of preventing future genocides.
As the family of Armenian Genocide survivor Andranik Vartanian, we are pleased that his testimony and those of other survivors will be accessible in perpetuity, not only to genocide scholars, but to the general public. Access to the Visual History Archive opens the door to researchers, educators, students, and scholars to study a contextualized history through primary-source testimony. In addition, future generations of Armenians will be able to connect with their ancestral past through the voices and memories of survivors, deepening their empathy, understanding, and respect for humanity.
Susan Vartanian Barba, who donated the perpetual subscription to the Visual History Archive in honor of Andranik Vartanian and his wife, Nvart.My mother was a genocide survivor who immigrated to this country as a teenager. My husband was a WWII veteran and a first-generation businessman, and my son, an M.B.A. They had a deep commitment to scholarly research and a thirst for continued learning. It is our hope that this viewing room serves as a resource to use the lessons from the past to point toward a better future.
Lucille Ajemian, who, on behalf of the Ajemian family, donated the archive viewing room in memory of her mother, Helen Paloian; her husband, Gerald Ajemian; and her son, John Gerald Ajemian.How the archive came to NAASR
NAASR’s role as an access point to this resource was the culmination of more than ten years of conversations and planning. In 2009, J. Michael Hagopian — the founder of the Armenian Film Foundation and NAASR’s first West Coast board member — was working to have the Armenian Genocide survivor testimonies he had filmed digitized and integrated into the Visual History Archive, and he expressed his hope to NAASR’s leadership that there would one day be a place where this material could be accessed. The idea stayed alive in ongoing discussions with the AFF’s new leadership, Carla Garapedian and Jerry Papazian. It is of special significance that the testimony of Andranik Vartanian — whose name is honored by NAASR’s perpetual access — lives in the archive as part of the AFF’s collection.
To make an appointment to use the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, contact NAASR at hq@naasr.org.
The Armenian Film Foundation Collection
Founded in 1979, the Armenian Film Foundation is dedicated to documenting Armenian heritage and preserving the personal histories of witnesses to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Its co-founder, Dr. J. Michael Hagopian, began interviewing survivors in 1968 and, beginning in 1982, recorded them on 16mm film; the resulting archive holds nearly 400 interviews conducted in ten countries and ten languages, of which 333 are now integrated into the Visual History Archive. In 2010, it became the first collection of Armenian Genocide survivor and witness testimony to enter the archive.
The Richard G. Hovannisian Armenian Genocide Oral History Collection
Richard G. Hovannisian (1932–2023) was one of the founders of Armenian Studies in the United States and, for more than fifty years, a professor of Armenian and Near Eastern history at UCLA. The collection that bears his name began in his classroom, where students trained in oral-history methodology interviewed survivors and their descendants; between 1972 and 2000 it grew to more than 1,000 interviews, recorded largely in Armenian and English. Thirty-four are currently available in the Visual History Archive — the first and only audio collection in the archive — with integration of the remainder dependent on funding.