all papers
Josiah Ober
Ober gives a synthetic view of his life’s work, from an early passion for ancient Greek history and archaeology to a wide-ranging academic career spanning rhetorical theory, political sociology and philosophy, behavioural sciences, classics, and political science.
John Olorunshola Kehinde
With the environmental turn in Nigerian literature in English, poetry has adopted more forceful decolonial aesthetics and heightened concern for the Nigerian environment – including its waters. The poets Kehinde cites embody this “decolonial ecology”.
Christophe Salomon
Instead of an overview of clocks and ultra-precise time measurement, Salomon relates his scientific journey, a dynamic quest through general relativity to quantum mechanics. Exploring the limits of unifying the two theories motivates his experiments.
A study, presented at Iinter-La+B (Milan, 9 September 2025), of glacier-climate interaction in the Himalayas, where the Karakoram Anomaly (glaciers remaining stable or growing due to localized climatic conditions) confirms the difficulty and complexity of this research, which is the key to predicting our future.
Susan Trumbore
Trumbore’s project presents a new way of framing Amazon forest debates that challenges the “tipping point” concept, showing that resilience is possible if people curb deforestation and fires and adopt policies to limit future climate change.
Johannes Oerlemans
Oerlemans has been measuring glaciers since 1950. Here, he examines the complexities of developing models of climate change, concluding that precaution and respect for nature are key in attempting to predict changes and consequently take action.
Jeffrey I. Gordon
An update on Gordon’s project to develop culturally acceptable, affordable, and scalable treatments for undernourished Bangladeshi children. His team has revealed a causal link between gut microbiome development, systems physiology and healthy growth.
Originally set to end in 2022, Eva Kondorosi’s Balzan Research Project continues to support students through training, mentoring, and scholarships. It also helps young researchers attend conferences, give lectures, and conduct fieldwork.
Technology to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere is now available. Senne Starckx describes two methods in use, direct air capture (DAC) and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), the latter earning Omar Yaghi the 2024 Balzan Prize and a share of the 2025 Nobel Prize.
David Damrosch
Considering literary ecology as an ecosystem that has evolved over two centuries, Damrosch examines its connection with ecology and evolutionary theory, going back to the origins of the disciplines of comparative philology and comparative literature.
Marco Ferrari
How many species of humans were there in prehistoric times? In tackling this question, Ferrari presents theories of human evolution, showing that we, Homo sapiens, are unique and alone – the last survivors of an evolutionary “bush” that once had a wealth of species.
Michaël Gillon
An update on Gillon’s Balzan Project, a major contribution to the success of SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing UltracOOl Stars) and to the study of the diversity of rocky exoplanets orbiting very low-mass stars and their potential habitability.
History of sciences and ideas 
Social sciences 
Law and rights 
Arts