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Biography

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) is an Indian scholar in literary theory. She has held the position 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.

Spivak was educated first at the University of Calcutta and then at Cornell University, where she completed her Ph.D. in 1967. She has taught at more than 20 universities, including the 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 and the American Philosophical Society.

Spivak is a scholar, public intellectual, and activist, and for decades, she has worked to promote education and development in many parts of the Global South. She is particularly known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), which has had a significant influence on postcolonial studies. 

Spivak has published nine books and translated many others. Her works have been translated into over 20 languages. Her key works include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and Certain Scenes of Teaching (2018). Her latest book is Spivak Moving (2024). 

Links

• Web page at Columbia University
• Holberg Committee Citation

Expert Contact

Contact the Holberg Prize Secretariat

Biography

Daniela Alaattinoğlu (b. 1989) is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Turku. She is the Principal Investigator of the project From the Margin to the Centre: Rights Development, Transitional Justice and Indigeneity in the Nordics(MARCEN),funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant, 2025–2029). Her research has been supported by grants from the Icelandic Research Fund (2020–2023), the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland (2020–2022), and the Research Council of Finland (2014–2019) among others.

Dr Alaattinoğlu’s work has been published in leading international journals. Her key publications include the monograph Grievance Formation, Rights and Remedies: Involuntary Sterilisation and Castration in the Nordics, 1930s–2020s (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and the co-edited volume Contesting Femicide: Feminism and the Power of Law Revisited (Routledge, 2019, with Dr Adrian Howe).

Dr Alaattinoğlu holds a PhD in law from the European University Institute (2019) and she has been awarded the title of Docent of socio-legal studies by the University of Turku. She has been a visiting fellow at institutions including the University of Melbourne (2018) and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2019). Dr Alaattinoğlu is also the co-editor of Retfærd: The Nordic Journal of Law and Justice and the co-founder of the research environment Law, Space and Justice at the Turku Law Faculty.

With research and teaching experience at ten higher education institutions across six countries, Dr Alaattinoğlu’s work examines how laws and societies evolve together, how groups mobilise for change, and how law intersectionally includes and excludes individuals and groups.

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Lenker

• Nils Klim Committee Citation.
• Web Page at the University of Turku

Expert Contact

Contact the Holberg Prize Secretariat

The Holberg Prize

The Holberg Prize is an international research prize, awarded annually to a scholar who has made outstanding research contributions to the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology. The Holberg Board awards the prize at the recommendation of the Holberg Committee. The Prize was established by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003 and is administered by the University of Bergen on behalf of the Ministry of Education and Research. It has a money value of NOK 6,000,000. The Holberg Prize is named after the scholar and author Ludvig Holberg, who played an important role in bringing the Age of Enlightenment to the Nordic countries.

The Nils Klim Prize

The Nils Klim Prize is awarded annually to a scholar from a Nordic country under the age of 35 for outstanding scholarly work in the arts and humanities, social sciences, law or theology. The Nils Klim Prize is awarded to a young Nordic scholar who has made an outstanding research contribution within one of these academic fields or through interdisciplinary work. The scholar’s ability to be original and innovative is highly emphasised. The Prize has a value of NOK 500,000. It is awarded by the Holberg Board at the recommendation of the Nils Klim Committee. The Prize is named after the hero in Ludvig Holberg’s novel Nils Klim’s journey to the underworld from 1741..

Holbergprisen i skolen

The Holberg School Programme is an annual research competition for students in the upper secondary schools in Norway.

The Holberg School Programme was established in 2004 as an initiative to increase understanding of and interest in research in the humanities, social sciences, law and theology amongst students in the Norwegian upper secondary school.

Each year, around 1,000 students from 20 selected schools participate in the competition. The projects are part of their regular classes in Norwegian, English, history, sociology and social anthropology, law and religion. The contestants are carrying out self-chosen research projects in cooperation with experienced scholars who help develop the projects.