The eighth edition of the Vienna Humanities Festival kicks off this week! Four keynotes at the Wien Museum, Radiokulturhaus, and Volkstheater lead up to the festival weekend at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where visitors can look forward to more than 20 thought-provoking panels featuring thinkers from across the entire spectrum of the humanities, social sciences, journalism, and literature. Live translation will be available for all weekend sessions.
Individuals and societies alike are on edge today, as the world changes in unexpected and deeply unsettling ways. What we are witnessing may very well be a Gramscian interregnum in which the old order has collapsed but its successor is still struggling to emerge. The morbid symptoms of this crisis are becoming apparent at nearly every turn, leaving us anxious and confused.
Life-changing technological innovation is advancing at an often unpredictable pace. Liberalism is under sustained attack, as is faith in basic scientific principles. Compassion seems to be going out of fashion, supplanted by brutal transactional values. Can humanity remain human under such strenuous circumstances? The political, economic, and social changes have been so swift that there is a temptation to surrender to a complexity that is hard to untangle. Yet this emotional labyrinth also challenges us to find a way out, by facing uncomfortable realities, unpicking intricacies, and standing up for a better tomorrow. In a series of enlightening discussions with some of the greatest thinkers of our time, the Vienna Humanities Festival will explore the political, ecological, technological, economic, psychological, and philosophical dilemmas now facing us—dilemmas that may seem overwhelming but which perhaps contain the seeds of renewal and change.
Saturday, 27 September 2025
11:00–12:00
Perry Anderson: Shaping the new world order
Leonie Haiden: (Des-) Informierte Demokratie
12:30–13:30
Maria Todorova: The short span of moral outrage
Jens Beckert: Warum scheitern wir beim Klimaschutz?
14:00–15:00
Sergey Radchenko: The Soviet collapse, Russia and Ukraine
Catrin Misselhorn: Kann KI Kunst hervorbringen?
15:30–16:30
Andrea Tompa: Home, belonging, and cultural identity in the 21st century
Esra Özyürek: Subcontractors of guilt
17:00–18:00
Tomáš Sedláček: The spirit of Europe - beyond economics and geography
Kai Strittmatter: China: Zukunft der Weltpolitik?
Sunday, 28 September 2025
11:00–12:00
Julián Casanova: Franco, a 20th century dictator
Lydia Cacho: Femicides, child pornography and Mexico's elite
12:30–13:30
Markus Reisner: Von Grabenkämpfen zum Drohnenkrieg: Der Krieg in der Ukraine,
Naomi Alderman: The power and the future
14:00–15:00
Ayşe Zarakol: Is the disorder of our times unprecedented?
Gary Gerstle: Traces of the Civil War: America's political trauma
15:30–16:30
Michal Hvorecký: Kultur und Widerstand. Was Europa von der Slowakei lernen kann
Rob Riemen: Can humanism survive in the 21st century?
17:00–18:00
Yascha Mounk: Cancel this! Woke, anti-woke und der Kampf um die Meinungsfreiheit
Tobias Haberl: Kann man im 21. Jahrhundert noch an Gott glauben?
Closing panel
Victor Blüml & Hannah Zeavin: On edge: the psychological impact of an unsettled world
Rewatch last year's talks here:
The festival will be held in English and German. Admission to the weekend sessions at the Academy is free. They will be translated live. Earphones will be provided at the venue. For more information and the entire program, visit humanitiesfestival.at. For interview requests, please contact iwm-pr@iwm.at.
In 2025, the festival is organized by the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and Time To Talk (TTT) in cooperation with ERSTE Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the City of Vienna, Ö1 Intro, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Wien Museum, and the Volkstheater.
