The Holberg Masterclass with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: ‘The Practice of Learning’

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Photo: Alice Attie.)

Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the 2025 Holberg Laureate. She has held the position of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University since 2007, where she has been a faculty member since 1991, and where she is also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak has published nine books and translated many others. Her works have been translated into over 20 languages. Spivak’s 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).

Sabina Ivenäs. (Photo: Private.)

Sabina Ivenäs is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Gothenburg. She holds an MA in Language and Culture in Europe. Her current research explores the postmigrant condition in contemporary Swedish and Danish poetry, with particular attention to its didactic dimensions.

My contribution to the Masterclass reflects on the ethical and pedagogical dimensions of teaching and exile through poetry. By using the concept of postmigration and the work of Gayatri Spivak, I want to discuss representation, listening, and the role of poetry for learning. Drawing on my research and teaching, I ask: what can poetry—particularly that emerging from marginalized voices—teach us about the human condition, and what responsibility do we as academics carry when read, name, and engage with it?

Sadie Hale. (Photo: Private.)

Sadie Hale is a third-year PhD candidate with the SEATIMES project at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen. Her research project, “Looking at people looking at whales”, draws on ethnographic fieldwork in whale tourism contexts in Arctic Norway.

My contribution will focus on:

*      Whale watching as a site of learning, where tourists’ attention is directed in specific ways (and not in others)
*      The inherently relational quality of sound and listening; the question of who gets to speak, who gets to be heard (and who doesn’t) remains as urgent as ever. In my fieldwork contexts, listening is a crucial method for finding and contextualising whales as sonic beings at a time of worsening underwater noise pollution
*      Moving beyond representing whales, and making space for them to ‘speak for themselves’ – but what could this mean in practice?

Jillian Loise Melchor. (Photo: Private.)

Jillian Loise Melchor is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki, developing decolonial paradigms for the study and preservation of creole language heritage. She authored Colonial Philippines in Italian Travel Writing (2024) and has published on the entanglements of language and power.

My contribution to the Masterclass reflects on the ethical and pedagogical dimensions of teaching and exile through poetry. By using the concept of postmigration and the work of Gayatri Spivak, I want to discuss representation, listening, and the role of poetry for learning. Drawing on my research and teaching, I ask: what can poetry—particularly that emerging from marginalized voices—teach us about the human condition, and what responsibility do we as academics carry when read, name, and engage with it?

Johannes Sartou. (Photo: Private.)

Johannes Sartou is a PhD candidate in Intellectual History at Aarhus University, working on a dissertation titled Staging the Subaltern: The Making and Remaking of the Past from Below, which explores the emergence of a historiographical approach centering “forgotten voices” and popular agency.

For the masterclass, I will reflect on how subaltern agency in historiography is not simply recovered but actively constructed through the historian’s engagement with the past—an engagement that often carries political stakes. Approached as an act of imaginative activism—a practice of effacing oneself to enter the field of another’s desire—this approach may help resist reinscribing the subaltern as absence and keep open the potential of writing history ‘from below.’

Telma Velez. (Photo: University of Iceland.)

Telma Velez (she/her) is a PhD candidate and a teacher at the University of Iceland. She holds a BA in International Education and an MA in International Relations, with a focus on intimate partner violence (IPV) among immigrant women and the role of the Istanbul Convention in the Icelandic context. Her current work focuses on immigrant women employment experiences in academic spaces.

I will explore how the ethics of learning in the humanities guide my research on violence against migrant women in academia. How suspended judgment and imaginative displacement enables ethical engagement with marginalized voices and transformation by the renewing of minds.