An Evening with the Holberg Prize
The Holberg Prize Laureate and the Nils Klim Prize Laureate in conversation.
This event will feature this year's Laureates Joan Martinez-Alier and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen in conversation about their background, their research and their experiences from academia, amongst other themes. The conversation will be moderated by Håvard Haarstad, professor at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, and Director of the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation.
Joan Martinez-Alier is professor emeritus at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB). He is also professor emeritus at Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), Quito. His research focuses on ecological economics, political ecology, agrarian studies, environmental justice, and the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous. In 2016 he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice (A global environmental justice movement), 2016-21. Martinez-Alier is also a co-founder of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas). Based on the EJAtlas, Martinez-Alier will publish the volume Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice in 2023. The book will analyse hundreds of “ecological distribution conflicts” and the “valuation languages” displayed by poor and indigenous activists. In 2020, Martinez-Alier was awarded the Balzan prize, and in 2023 the Holberg prize.
Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen is Associote Professor of Nordic Language and Literature at Aarhus University, where she leads a research group on fiction and science in the 18th century. Zetterberg-Nielsen is an editor of the journals 1700-tal and Passage, where she has contributed to publishing a large number of issues. She has published articles about the 18th century novel and fictionality in a historical perspective in journals such as Narrative, Style, Poetics Today, The Living Handbook of Narratology, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. She has also written or edited books such as Fiktion, Fiktionalitet – i sprog, litteratur og kultur, Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited, Middelalderisme i dansk romantisk litteratur, and Litteratur og idéhistorie. Zetterberg-Nielsen has received numerous grants and awards, and in 2023, she receives the Nils Klim Prize.
Håvard Haarstad is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Bergen (UiB). His main research focus is social change towards sustainability, particularly in relation to climate. Haarstad is founding director at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation, an interdisciplinary research centre based at the Faculty of Social Science, UiB, that works to create ‘actionable knowledge’ – knowledge that is produced and communicated in ways that help shape society.
This event is a part of the Holberg Week, which this year takes place 6 - 12 June.