A Message from CHCI President Sara Guyer at the 2021 CHCI Annual Meeting

I am pleased to welcome you to CHCI’s 2021 Annual Meeting. Over the past 15 months, CHCI, like all of your centers and institutes, has shifted our programming, our language, and our strategies to address the ongoing—and I believe increased—importance of the global humanities and humanities centers and institutes in our current conditions.

Our theme, “Ruptures/Responses,” acknowledges that this year has been a convulsive one. Registration for this meeting—which is at more than 700 individuals—acknowledges the collective interest and need for this kind of exchange.

Violence and vulnerability have become extreme and visible, from the state-sponsored murder of George Floyd last summer to the state-sponsored displacement and murder of Palestinians this summer. This has taken place in a context in which around the world we have experienced isolation and entanglement; unevenness and pervasiveness; fear and suffering and loss.

We also have seen accelerated international collaborations and reflected on care and communication with exceptional urgency.

During this difficult year, many universities have been largely or entirely closed to in-person meetings, and the work of humanities centers and institutes, which depends upon the crossing of borders—intellectual, institutional, and physical—has continued through new forms and models. Locally-hosted lectures have become international events, while everyday coffees and informal meetings have largely evaporated. As parts of the world open up, we will continue to explore together what practices are durable and what needs to be reconceived and rebuilt.

The 2021 Annual Meeting is designed to recognize and reveal the worlds that humanities centers and institutes made over the past year and to reflect on the worlds that we hope to open in the years to come.

As many of you know, in a “normal” year, the CHCI Board also would have met prior to the Annual Meeting. This year, in an effort to avoid Zoom fatigue, we are postponing the Board meeting until June 2021. One of the main topics that the Board will discuss is our plan for institutional and leadership transition, as I move to UC Berkeley to become the Dean of Arts & Humanities. We will continue to share news and updates with the membership.

During the year since we last met, CHCI has launched new programs, in large part because it was not safe or possible to conduct several of our signature projects—like the Global Humanities Institutes, the summer institute on Chinese Studies and Global Humanities, and the African Humanities Workshops. We delayed meetings in Mozambique, Morocco, Virginia, South Africa, Arizona, and Austria, among others. At the same time, the Global Humanities Institute led by Joyce C. H. Liu in Taiwan has managed to meet virtually with an astonishing set of international webinars that will be a model for CHCI and for the global humanities moving forward.

We began a new partnership with the National Humanities Alliance in the U.S. to bring together humanities center and institute directors for monthly conversations about shared challenges. We expanded our podcast series Voices from the Global Humanities to feature the new programs that humanities centers and institutes are undertaking over the course of this challenging year, and we completed two episodes of Ideas from Africa, our radio collaboration that includes both To the Best of our Knowledge and Africa is a Country.

We also have continued work on the World Humanities Report, which, despite pandemic-related delays, has drawn together scholars from six continents to reflect on the state of the humanities in the world and identify the conditions under which the humanities will flourish.

For many of you, despite sometimes extreme social and financial challenges, your centers and institutes have found new ways to think about the public humanities and inclusive collaboration and also to respond to our contemporary conditions. This has been a year of excessive suffering. It also has revealed forms of creativity.

Our meeting program thus includes many new formats designed to bring visibility to and draw inspiration from the work that humanities centers and institutes, around the world, are undertaking under these conditions. I hope that you will participate in these sessions, particularly the two "Responses to Rupture" presentations featuring more than a dozen member organization programs.

I would also like to highlight some of other parts of the Annual Meeting:

On Thursday, May 20, we will hear from Phillip Brian Harper and Dianne Harris of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation who will share with us their vision for humanities-focused philanthropy in the near term. We will also have a session to generate strategies for strengthening CHCI’s approach to inclusivity, one that recognizes the interface between demographic and intellectual shifts and that understands inclusivity in both a domestic and global context.

There will be opportunities to hear about one of the current Global Humanities Institutes focused on Climate Justice and talk with project leaders and members of the GHI selection and planning committee about your plans and proposals for future projects.

Finally, we are thrilled to welcome three keynote speakers, each of whom will address an element of the meeting’s theme: Warwick Anderson, Natalie Diaz, and Claudia Rankine. This year our meeting will open and close with poetry and with poets—as witnesses, critics, and world-makers – affirming CHCI’s ongoing commitment to exploring connections between the humanities and the arts.

I want to thank CHCI’s staff for coordinating all aspects of this meeting: Guillaume Ratel, Bill Warner, and Melissa Ulbricht have had to redesign and rethink our usual formats and do so without the advantage of a conventional “host.” Amanda Kelly and her team at UW-Madison have helped with virtual event planning. The planning committee, including Paul Fleming, Debjani Ganguly, Jennifer Ho, Premesh Lalu, and Pablo Oyarzun, offered invaluable assistance to envision a program adequate to our current moment. Lastly, I want to thank CHCI’s membership and international advisory board, which together infuse the consortium with an intellectual and interventionist spirit that reflects the critical role of humanities centers and institutes for advocacy, collaboration, and understanding.

Sara Guyer
President