Judith Butler (Berkeley University of California) is a Maxine Eliot professor at the Department for Comparative Literature and at the Program for Critical Theory – which she is one of the founders of – at Berkeley University of California. She got her PhD in philosophy at the university of Yale in 1984. She is an author of the following books among others: 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); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak, 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Is Critique Secular? (with Talalom Asad, Wendy Brown and Saba Mahmood, 2009), Sois Mon Corps (2011), in co-authorship with Catherine Malabou. Among her new book the following stand out: Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) i Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, written with Athena Athanasiou (2013), Senses of the Subject (2015). Her last book, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, was published in November 2015.
Butler is also an activist in the field of gender and sexual politics, human rights and antiwar politics; she is a member of the advisory board for the Jewish Voice for Peace. She was awarded the Andrew Mellon award for exceptional contribution to the humanities (2009-2013). She was also awarded the Theodor Adorno award for her contribution to feminist and moral philosophy (2012), and the The Brudner Prize on the Yale University for her life contribution to gay and lesbian studies as well as an award for the research lecturer of the California University of Berkeley in 2005.
