Holberg Prize PhD Masterclass 2025: The Practice of Learning
Ph.D. -course
- ECTS credits
- 5
- Teaching semesters Spring
- Course code
- HOL900
- Number of semesters
- 1
- Teaching language
- English
- Resources
- Schedule
Course description
Objectives and Content
In connection with the Holberg Week 2025 and as part of the academic events related to 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we invite applications from all Ph.D. students of Anthropology and of related social science and humanities disciplines to take part in a Masterclass. Applicants, who have to be based at Nordic Universities, will be selected by the pool of applicants by Academic Director of the Holberg Prize, prof. Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, in collaboration with the Secretariat.
Description of Masterclass theme "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 fulfillment of those desires. This Masterclass will discuss these and related issues.
Learning Outcomes
- participate in an on-stage, high-profile discussion with fellow PhD students and the 2025 Holberg Prize Laureate
- summarise and popularise her/his research for a large audience
- demonstrate an independent overview of key notions and insights provided by the course literature
- receive and provide constructive criticism of other positions and statements during the Masterclass
ECTS Credits
Level of Study
Semester of Instruction
Spring
2 May - 4 June
The application deadline is 25 April 2025.
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.
Please register by using this form
Decisions to all applicants about course admittance is given within 2 May 2025.
Place of Instruction
Required Previous Knowledge
Recommended Previous Knowledge
Credit Reduction due to Course Overlap
Access to the Course
The Holberg Prize offers scholarships for five PhD candidates in the Nordic countries to participate in the Masterclass.
The candidates must be enrolled in a PhD programme at a Nordic university and has to be an active PhD student at the time of the Masterclass. The Masterclass is not open to MA students.
Teaching and learning methods
The programme consists of two parts:
- Individual studies of the curriculum and pre-event preparation.
- Participation in the Masterclass, and other events during the Holberg Week
Lecturer: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
Compulsory Assignments and Attendance
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 Spivak in advance. The discussion will be held in English.
In addition to the above, participants are also expected to actively participate in other relevant academic activities during the Holberg Week, including symposia, lectures and public discussions.
The total amount of workload is stipulated to be four weeks. This includes 4 days of participation to above-mentioned academic events in Bergen and preparatory work in relation reading the curriculum and preparing for the Masterclass.
Forms of Assessment
Grading Scale
Assessment Semester
Reading List
Curriculum
Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. Can the subaltern speak? Section from Chapter 3 "History" in Critique of postcolonial reason starting 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.