Judith Butler: Endangered Scholarship, Academic Freedom, and the Life of Critique

Description

Judith Butler, professor emeritus in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, will give a talk titled "Endangered Scholarship, Academic Freedom, and the Life of Critique" as the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute's Annual Richard A. Macksey Lecture.

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot professor emeritus in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley from 1993-2021. They received their Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are 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), and The Force of Non-Violence (2020). Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages and they have received 13 honorary degrees. From 2015 to 2020, they were a principal investigator of a Mellon Foundation Grant that supports 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 were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13) and were elected as a 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.

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