Judith Butler

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley where they taught in Critical Theory, Rhetoric, and Comparative Literature for nearly 30 years. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984.  the author of several books, including Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?(2009), Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Who Sings the Nation-State? (2008) with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political co-authored with Athena Athanasiou (2013), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Vulnerability in Resistance (co-authored with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 2016), The Force of Non-Violence, (2020), What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022)., and Who’s Afraid of Gender?  Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, (2024).

Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages, and they have received 14 honorary degrees. They were from 2015-2020 a principal investigator of the Mellon Foundation Grant that initiated the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs on whose board they now serve as co-chair. Butler is active in several human rights organizations, having served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and presently on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They also serve on the boards of several journals, including Critical Times. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13), were elected as  Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2018, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2020, they served as President of the Modern Language Association. In 2025, they were awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.