2025 Genocide Awareness Lecture - "Friends Who Disappear: Documenting the Guatemalan Genocide and Forced Disappearance"

"Friends Who Disappear: Documenting the Guatemalan Genocide and Forced Disappearance" featuring Professor Victoria Sanford

Lecture Description: This lecture is a forensic investigation into Dr. Marvyn Perez’s childhood disappearance and torture by Guatemalan state forces. Professor Victoria Sanford centers her talk around a story of survival that unravels the strange history of “forced disappearance” in Guatemala as well as the role of the United States in this heinous practice. Marvyn was one of 5,000 children disappeared by state forces during the Guatemalan Genocide of the 1980s, but he survived to share the story of his journey back from the abyss and has since used his unique experience in a continuous struggle for justice. This lecture will also illuminate how methods from Forensic Anthropology have been applied to exhumations of mass graves and investigations of forced disappearances to provide evidence of command responsibility for ongoing genocide court cases.

Speaker Bio: A public scholar, anthropologist and internationally recognized expert on the Guatemalan Genocide, Victoria Sanford is a writer, human rights advocate, and Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of seven books including Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel & Her Father’s Quest for Justice and Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. She served as an invited expert 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. A John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Bunting Peace Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has also held fellowships at the US Institute for Peace, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Fulbright Scholar awards at the Universidad Libre and Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia, among others. She is the 2025 Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research. To learn more about Dr. Sanford’s work, visit: https://www.victoriasanford.info/

This lecture will be held via Zoom webinar. The event is free and open to all; however, you must register in order to log into the webinar. Registration is available here. Alternatively, you may join our on-campus viewing of the livestream in Norma Walker Hall. Registration for the livestream viewing party is available here. Please register if you wish to join the on-campus viewing as seating is limited. Only those guests who have pre-registered are guaranteed seating. We will host a coffee gathering for in-person attendees after the lecture for anyone who would like to stay and discuss it.

This year's Genocide Awareness Lecture is part of a 2024-2025 series on "Forensics and Genocide" being offered by the Cohen Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. If you would like to make a gift to support this lecture or other Center offerings, please visit:https://giving.keene.edu/cchgs/

This event is part of the Cohen Center calendar.