From June 23-26, 2025, the CHCI Annual Meeting will take place at the Harnack Haus of the Max Planck Society in Berlin. Registration is now available, as well as our recommendation for a hotel. We anticipate publishing the full program by the end of April.
Resentment and the Work of the Humanities | CHCI Annual Meeting 2025
The 2025 CHCI Annual Meeting in Berlin will bring together scholars and advocates for the humanities to examine ressentiment, its place within critical theory, and its recent resurgence in contemporary politics. As resentment fuels populist, nationalist, and illiberal movements around the globe, our Berlin gathering will seek to better understand these trends and the humanities' capacity to transform these forces into constructive action.
Friedrich Nietzsche described ressentiment as the reassignment of one’s felt inferiority to an external other (i.e., “scapegoating”)—a value system or “morality,” in his view, based on projection and insularity. “Resentment and the Work of the Humanities” will consider the university as it struggles within this ethical and moral landscape—the ways the academy sits uneasily as both an object of cynicism and public mistrust and the source of the traditions of left critique that have been appropriated by the New Right and other illiberal political movements. By returning to the notion of ressentiment, this conference hopes to explore how the humanities may yet again transform social and political aspiration, and may generate a counter-imaginary to recent authoritarian trends.
The conference’s keynote lectures, panels, and collaborative workshops will investigate how discontent and resentment intersect with movements for justice and equity. Special attention will be given to developing actionable frameworks for humanities centers to confront political polarization, social inequality, and systemic injustice through advocacy and public engagement.
Hosted at Berlin’s historic Harnack Haus, the 2025 Annual Meeting invites participants to reimagine the humanities' leadership in a fractured world and to collaborate on pathways toward more just and inclusive futures.
The CHCI Annual Meeting is our international conference for leaders in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Each Annual Meeting is hosted by a member center or institute and focuses on a theme chosen by the host director. The program is a balance between thematic sessions and member-oriented sessions, including a Membership Plenary, Best Practices for Humanities Centers, and sessions led by our CHCI Networks. The Annual Meeting takes place in May/June and we aim to meet at a venue outside of North America every other year. Attendees include but are not limited to humanities center and institute directors and staff, early career scholars interested in humanities leadership, humanities networks and funders, academic administrators, and non-academic humanities leaders.
Above: Ana L. M. Rodrigues, Untitled, 2009 © Stiftung Berliner Mauer, photographer: Günther Schaefer