Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Receives Major International Prize for Outstanding Research in the Humanities

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, has been named the 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate. Funded by the Norwegian Government, the University of Bergen and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, the award is presented annually in recognition of outstanding research in the humanities, social sciences, law, or theology. The prize, worth roughly $540,000, is one of the largest international awards for humanities research.

A Columbia faculty member since 1991, Dr. Spivak has held the title of University Professor for nearly two decades. She also serves as a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Sciences.

Since the 1970s, Dr. Spivak has conducted extensive interdisciplinary research on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British, French, and German literature; politics of culture; feminism; Marxism; the works of French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida; globalization; post-Kantian literary theory; and climate change. She has translated, edited, and authored numerous books, including her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University, 1976), which is considered one of the most influential publications in introducing the philosophy of deconstruction to the English-speaking world.

Dr. Spivak is an honors graduate of Presidency College in Calcutta, India, where she majored in English. She earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Cornell University in New York. Throughout her career, she has been awarded 15 honorary doctorates from universities around the world.