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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

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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