The Balzan Foundation collects scientific contributions, and dissertations from its prizewinners for periodic publications. The Balzan Papers journal has been digital since 2024, and here, some updates on the research projects of the Balzan prizewinners are also gathered.
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recent papers
Robert O. Keohane
Keohane reflects on major aspects of his work, from world politics and economic interdependence, to international institutions and the complexity of international regimes, especially vis-à-vis climate change, the subject of his Balzan research project.
Senne Starckx
Eske Willerslev returns to his first research interest: ancient environmental DNA. In his words, «That’s where the new frontier lies in our field». The research not only tells something about the distant past, but it might also help steer our future.
Quentin Skinner
Skinner reflects on his intellectual path over the past twenty years, from theorizing a third concept of freedom, to reconstructing the concept of State and defending it in our normative discourse against oversimplifying theorizers of the «death of the State», to the crisis of contemporary democracies.
Marco Ferrari
Recent assumptions about the nature and physiology of plants could revolutionise our perspective on the world of plants. But orthodoxy is not easy to change. The first of this two-part article deals with plant neurobiology.
Marylin Strathern
During the COVID-19 pandemic, divergent as well as convergent narratives cried out for attention. Strathern discusses them through the anthropological response and its reception in the UK while questioning individual responsibility and the usefulness of “common humanity” as a universal concept.
Peter Brown
Susannah Gold interviews Peter Brown and his Balzan research project leader, David Michelson, about the process of “reconceiving the historical reference work” with the online historical reference for Syriac studies, syriaca.org, the cornerstone of Figures in a Landscape.
