Speaker: Judith Butler, PhD

Judith Butler is a post-structuralist philosopher and queer theorist. They are most famous for their notion of gender performativity, but their work includes literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19^th- and 20^th-century European literary theory and philosophy, Kafka and loss, mourning and war.

Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. Butler has held academic appointments at Weslyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University. They founded the International Consortium of Critical Theory, funded by the Mellon Foundation in 2015. They also hold the Hannah Arendht Chair at the European Graduate School.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voices for Peace. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13) and received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy; the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies. They are the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, and American Council of Learned Societies.