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 thirty years. They received their PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of numerous 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 (2013, with Athena Athanasiou), Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Vulnerability in Resistance (2016, with Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay), The Force of Non-Violence (2020), What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022), and Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).
Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages, and they have received fourteen honorary degrees. From 2015 to 2020, they were a principal investigator of a Mellon Foundation grant that initiated the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, whose board they now 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 currently on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They also serve on the boards of several journals, including Critical Times.
They received the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009–2013), were elected 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. In 2025, they received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Council of Learned Societies.