The 2000 annual CHCI meeting was designed to feature not only a prominent humanities center –the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley- but also highlighted a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship residency site in the humanities –the UC Berkeley project “Community in Contention: Cultures of Crisis, Exile and Democracy” housed in the Institute for International Studies. The conference opened with a public session entitled “Communities in Crisis: Human Rights, Reconstruction, Tolerance” featuring presentations by Joanna Bourke, David Rieff, Deborah Hoffman, and Frances Reid. Sessions on the second day of the conference were designed for administrator-scholars of humanities centers and Rockefeller humanities fellowship residency sites. Panels were held on “Researching Rights,” “Internationalizing Knowledge,” “Assessing the Humanities,” and “Engaging Communities.” The final session, “Charting Directions,” was designed to discuss future directions in the humanities.