The USC Institute of Armenian Studies (IAS) advances research and collaboration that examines the social, cultural, educational, and political challenges facing Armenia, Karabakh, and the Armenian communities in the Diaspora. Through research, public service, and the creation of networks among global Armenian communities — including the sizable community living in Los Angeles — IAS provides accessible information to both scholars and the community at large to better protect and document Armenian heritage and history.
See: Oral History and Digitization Project - Stewards of Trauma: Oral History Collections of the USC Institute of Armenian Studies. This Project involves creating, gathering, digitizing, and making accessible materials that comprise the Armenian experience across time and geography, with the aim of further integrating Armenian narratives within a broader global context.
The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) is a collaborative Center founded by William Deverell, for scholarly investigation of the history and culture of California and the American West. Through sponsorship of innovative scholarship, research, and programming, ICW pairs scholars from USC and other universities and draws on the resources of the University of Southern California and The Huntington Library to build a unique collaboration amongst a research university, a research library, and the public. ICW expands our understanding of the region's history and its mythos, while offering new perspectives on complex issues of the day.
See: Chinatown History Project: In collaboration with historian Greg Hise and friends at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, The Huntington, and USC Cinema, the Chinatown History Project blends historical research with a creative website and augmented reality experiences to recover the neighborhood of the original Chinatown of Los Angeles.
See also: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) January 2023 NEH Grant Award (Category: Digital Projects for the Public: Prototyping Grants]: The Chinatown History Project - Prototyping of a multiformat digital project on the history of Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Project Director: William Deverell.
In the mid-1930s, the city’s first Chinatown, a vibrant, polyglot neighborhood of several thousand people, was razed to make way for Union Station, the last major metropolitan train station constructed in the United States. From a foundational database research project designed to repopulate this place with the lives of the people who lived and worked there, the project expands outward by inviting audiences and end users to see within and across layers of Southern California space and history.