Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminist and queer theory. Her work on Antigone and the politics of kinship is entitled Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000). Her works since 2000 are: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek) (2000); Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law (2002); Women and Social Transformation (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Lidia Puigvert) (2002); Kierkegaard’s Speculative Despair in The age of German Idealism (edited by Robert C. Solomon) (2002); Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004); Undoing Gender (2004); Giving An Account of Oneself (2005); Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak) (2007); Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2008); Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009); The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011); The Question of Gender: Joan W. Scott’s Critical Feminism (2011); and Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012).

Butler was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Award in 2012 for her work on political theory, on moral philosophy, and gender studies.