CURE Summer School 2025: Dynamics of Despair
22-26 September 2025 | Villa Vigoni, Italy
- event for: PhD students
- form of the event: summer school
- language: English
- application deadline: 28 March
About
The first CURE Summer School will take place from 22 to 26 September 2025 at Villa Vigoni (German-Italian Center for European Dialogue) in Menaggio, Lake Como, Italy. This annual event is organized by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities ‘Cultural Practices of Reparation’ (CURE) and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL Berlin), in collaboration with THALIM (UMR, Sorbonne Nouvelle/CNRS), the Catholic University of Portugal, the University of Trieste, and the University of Naples Federico II. The theme for 2025 is ‘Dynamics of Despair’.
A total of twenty selected PhD students will have all travel and accommodation expenses covered. Applications can be submitted via our online portal, with a deadline of 28 March 2025.
Despair is one of today’s dominant collective emotions. However, it does not necessarily imply resignation, passivity, or withdrawal. A critical tradition, from Walter Benjamin to The Invisible Committee, argues that it is not despair but rather hope that prevents us from taking action.
The first CURE Summer School invites participants to explore cultural practices that counteract what Franco Berardi calls “the slow cancellation of the future.” Together, we will reflect on how art, literature, film, television, critical theory, and theology engage with despair and mobilize this emotion to find ways of overcoming depression, denial, resentment, and indifference.
For more details on the call for applications and the application process, visit: cure.uni-saarland.de/en/research/cure-summer-school/
The CURE Summer School is organized by Dr. Julien Jeusette and Prof. Dr. Markus Messling.
For any questions regarding the application process, please contact us via e-mail at julien.jeusette@khk.uni-saarland.de
