The 2025 MLK Day keynote speaker is scholar and author Erica Chenoweth, an expert in mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression.

Chenoweth is the academic dean for faculty development and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, faculty dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute

Chenoweth’s current book project, The End of People Power, investigates why civil resistance movements in recent years are meeting with less success.