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
Joan Martínez Alier
Martínez Alier reflects on four decades of work in ecological economics, comparative and statistical political ecology, and environmental justice, highlighting the Atlas of Environmental Justice (www.ejatlas.org), his primary focus over the past ten years.
Willerslev’s Balzan Research Project addresses the computational challenges posed by vast databases of sequence data, aiming to improve both the speed and accuracy of taxonomic assignments of environmental DNA and ancient DNA.
Francesco Ranci
Can democratic societies resist authoritarian opposition without becoming authoritarian themselves? Ranci revisits Plato’s account of Socrates’ death against the backdrop of Athenian democracy and wonders about democracy’s fate in today’s globalized world.
Senne Starckx
The momentous detection of gravitational waves (ripples in spacetime caused when two black holes merge) by laser interferometers and the subsequent finds of second-generation detectors have paved the way for the proposed third-generation Einstein Telescope.
Jean-Jacques Hublin
Homo sapiens’ evolution in northwestern Africa is explored by applying cutting-edge analytic methods to records from Moroccan cave sites and working with local researchers to recon-struct anatomy, technology, diet and symbolism; all findings to be on open access.
David Damrosch
Damrosch’s research project will bring around ten graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to the Institute for World Literature as members of the year’s Balzan Colloquium. Each summer for five years, they will develop their work on a common topic in world literary studies for publication.
