Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak named 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate

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A professor of Indian origin at Columbia University has been named the 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate, a March 13, announcement from the University said.

A Professor in the Humanities, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak will be awarded the Prize June 5 during a formal ceremony at the University of Bergen in Norway.

Holberg is one of the largest international research prizes (about $540,000) awarded annually for outstanding research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. The prize is established and funded by the Norwegian Government, and administered by the University of Bergen, on behalf of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

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“Spivak is considered one of today’s most influential global intellectuals, and she has shaped literary criticism and philosophy since the 1970s,” Columbia noted in its announcement. She is getting the prize for her “groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research in comparative literature, translation, postcolonial studies, political philosophy, and feminist theory.”

She has authored nine books, and edited and translated many more. Her scholarship has been translated into more than 20 languages; she has also taught and lectured in over 50 countries.

“Taking the core of Western thought as an object of critical analysis, Spivak has inspired, enabled, and supported otherwise inconceivable lines of critical interrogations—both at the centers and margins of global modernity,” Holberg Committee Chair Heike Krieger is quoted saying in the press release.

Spivak in her comment, stressed the importance of supporting the humanities. “No amount of merely being able to use knowledge as intellectual property can lead to a democratic and just society if we have not gone into training in the practice of learning,” she said. “This is to learn that what you approach is not only an object of knowing, but also a subject of learning.”

Spivak’s focus has been on the subaltern population, small social groups lacking the clout and rights, that do not get represented in the broad generalizations about a nation state. Spivak has focused on subaltern women, within both discursive practices and in cultural institutions, notes the press release, adding, “She has challenged and expanded the boundaries of contemporary thought as a scholar and an activist.”

For the last 40 years, Spivak has taught at independent elementary schools in marginalized communities, such as so- untouchables and the tribals in the poorest parts of India, and also in other countries.

“Through her work inside and outside academia, Spivak has been a great source of inspiration to young scholars, particularly, though not only, from the Global South,” said Columbia.

Her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is considered a seminal work.

Her latest book is Spivak Moving, a collection of her essays and lectures. She is currently working on a book about W. E. B. Du Bois, tentatively titled Globalizing Enslavement: My Brother Burghardt.

At Columbia University since 1991, Spivak has held the post of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia since 2007. She is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Spivak is a Corresponding Fellow at the British Academy, and a Guggenheim Fellow, She has received more than 50 faculty awards. Other prestigious honors include the Kyoto Prize in Art and Philosophy, India’s Padma Bhushan, and the Modern Language Association Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award. She has received 15 honorary doctorates from around the world.

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