Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Named 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate

The Department of English and Comparative Literature congratulates Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, on being named the 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate.

The Holberg Prize is one of the largest international prizes awarded annually to an outstanding researcher in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology.

Professor Spivak will receive the award during a June 5th ceremony at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Spivak is considered one of the most influential global intellectuals of our time, and she has shaped literary criticism and philosophy since the 1970s. She receives the prize for her groundbreaking interdisciplinary research in comparative literature, translation, postcolonial studies, political philosophy, and feminist theory. Spivak has authored nine books and edited and translated many more. Her scholarship has been translated into well over twenty languages. She has also taught and lectured in more than fifty countries.

Spivak’s main ethical and research focus has been on post-Hegelian philosophy, and the position of the subaltern, i.e. small social groups on the margins of history who cannot exercise their rights and whose perspectives cannot be included in generalizations about the nation state. In particular, Spivak has focused on subaltern women, within both discursive practices and in cultural institutions.

The Laureate has challenged and expanded the boundaries of contemporary thought both as a scholar, a public intellectual and an activist. In addition to her work at university, she has been teaching for the last 40 years in self-subsidized elementary schools among the so-called "untouchables" and the tribals in the poorest parts of India, as part of her efforts to combat the absence of democratic education in marginalized rural communities across several countries. Her activism and scholarship have also focussed on poverty and development in Africa, with a particular interest in the first languages unsystematized by the missionaries. Through her work inside and outside academia, Spivak has been a great source of inspiration to young scholars, particularly, though not only, from the Global South.

One of Spivak’s best known works is her seminal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), which has become a cornerstone of postcolonial subaltern studies. From a consideration of French high theory, the essay moves to the experience of widow-burning in colonial and pre-colonial India, and Spivak explores the ways in which subaltern resistance is not recognized within dominant discourses, challenging scholars to rethink their approaches to representation and voice.

About the Laureate
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has held the post of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University since 2007, where she is also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She was educated first at the University of Calcutta and then at Cornell University, where she completed her Ph.D. degree in 1967. She has since taught at more than 20 universities, including University of Ghana, Princeton University, University of California at Irvine, New School for Social Research, University of Pittsburgh, Brown University, University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and Cornell University. 

Spivak is a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as of the American Philosophical Society. She has received more than 50 faculty awards, and her many honours include the Kyoto Prize in Art and Philosophy (2012), the Padma Bhushan (2013), and the Modern Language Association Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award (2018). She holds fifteen honorary doctorates from around the world.

About the Holberg Prize
Established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003, the Holberg Prize is one of the largest annual international research prizes awarded for outstanding contributions to research in the humanities, social science, law or theology. The Prize is funded by the Norwegian Government through a direct allocation from the Ministry of Education and Research to the University of Bergen. Previous Laureates include Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells, Onora O’Neill, Cass Sunstein, Paul Gilroy, Sheila Jasanoff, and Achille Mbembe. Anyone holding an academic position at a university, academy or other research institution may nominate candidates for the Holberg Prize. The nomination deadline is 15 June each year. 

To learn more about the Holberg Prize, visit: https://holbergprize.org/.