RESOURCES

Teaching and Discussion Guide

The Book of Genocides is uniquely suited for secondary classrooms and for community discussions about genocide and human rights. We are developing a teacher’s guide and a discussion/event guide to support classroom use, book clubs, and library programming. Please check back in August to download the guide.

The VR Experience

Girl, Earth, Fire is an animated VR experience based on Dana Mashoian Walrath’s The Book of Genocides. Moving between ancestral and earthly realms, it weaves together stories of the Armenian and Palestinian genocides, the Holocaust, and Indigenous peoples of southern Africa to show how genocidal violence arises from remediable systems and cultural forces, rather than from an inevitable human nature. Learn more here.

The Book of Genocides Artwork

Before it was a book, The Book of Genocides was a large-scale artwork. Explore the original work in the gallery below. If you are interested in bringing the art or the VR experience to your museum, gallery, or campus, please contact hup_news@harvard.edu.

Media Downloads

On the left page, a young Armenian girl with wide eyes and long braids hides curled up inside a large urn, surrounded by jagged lines of fear. Handwritten text narrates how the artist’s Armenian grandmother, Oghidar Troshagiran, hid in an urn as her father was publicly dismembered during the Armenian genocide; her mother and sister were enslaved, and she and her younger siblings fled from their village near Palu (in today’s eastern Turkey) to Aleppo. At the bottom, two smaller panels show thorny barbed‑wire shapes and speech bubbles where the narrator reflects on honor culture, “an eye for an eye,” and the anger and despair that fuel cycles of violence, while insisting “our dreams can be different.” On the right page, a large crescent‑shaped wreath of hands and barbed‑wire forms encircles text about watching Israeli bombing of Gaza in December 2023 and remembering Azerbaijan’s recent conquest of the Armenian homeland Artsakh; the narrator writes that they asked the ancestors for help. Below, more handwritten text introduces Raphael Lemkin, the Polish jurist who coined the word “genocide” and helped create the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. A portrait shows Lemkin at a desk, pen in hand, as if appearing to the artist, with a final note: “Or perhaps I went to him.”

Spread from the Introduction