The Holberg Prize is offering scholarships for five PhD candidates in the Nordic countries to participate in a Masterclass with Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the topic “The Practice of Learning” on 4th June, 2025. The deadline for applications is 25th April, 2025.
PhD candidates in the Nordic countries can now apply to participate in a Masterclass with Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the 2025 Holberg Laureate. The event takes place during the Holberg Week in Bergen, on Wednesday, 4th June, 2025, 10:00–12:00.
Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered, and the participants are also invited to other events during the Holberg Week (3rd–6th June). The PhD Masterclass is open to the public and will be livestreamed. Video will remain online after the event.
Participation in the Masterclass will earn you five ECST credits.
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“The Practice of Learning”
All disciplines produce knowledge and the students learn to know. The humanities – literature and philosophy – teach the practice of learning. In knowing, you know an object.
In the practice of learning, as taught by the humanities, you attempt to hold yourself effaced, suspending judgment, in order to displace yourself into the space of what you are trying to learn. This is imaginative activism. The literary or philosophical text stages a field of desire. Uninstructed reading usually takes the text to be a fulfilment of those desires. This Masterclass will discuss these and related issues.
About Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Format and preparation
Drawing also on their own work, participants are asked to prepare a five-minute presentation related to the main topic of the Masterclass. In addition to knowledge of the texts below, participants are also asked to prepare questions for Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in advance. The discussion will be held in English. Please note that this event will be open to the general public.
Curriculum
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. Can the subaltern speak? Section from Chapter 3 “History” in Critique of postcolonial reasonstarting with the line “At the other end of the spectrum…”. Harvard University Press, pp. 244-311.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2010. “In response”, in Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea, Rosalind C. Morris (ed.). Columbia University Press, pp. 227-236.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2017. “Global Marx?”, in Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees, Richard McIntyre, Robert Garnett Jr. and Theodore Burczak (eds). Taylor and Francis, pp. 265-287.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2023. “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition”, in Death of a Discipline. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Columbia University Press, pp. 1-8.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2015. “Crimes of Identity”. In Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker (eds). Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 207-227.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2003. “Foucault and Najibullah”, in “Other Asias”. Wiley pp. 132-161.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2016. “Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Here, Now”, in Constellations of a contemporary Romanticism, Jacques Khalip and Forrest Pyle (eds). Fordham University Press, pp. 309-322. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c99996.17
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2020. “Being Human”. Keynote given at MLA 2020. DRAFT DO NOT QUOTE.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2024. “Teaching for a Broken World.” ANGLICA-An International Journal of English Studies 33.3 (2024): 11-26.
How to apply
Apply for the Masterclass by completing the application form below. We ask that you submit a letter of motivation (no more than 3,500 characters), your CV and contact information. Deadline for applications: 25th April, 2025.
If you have any questions about the event, application requirements or practicalities, please contact the Holberg Prize Secretariat at info@holbergprisen.no.