Judith Butler to Deliver the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture

Friday, April 25, 2025 | 6:15 PM ET

ACLS is pleased to announce that Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and former Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, will deliver the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture at the 2025 ACLS Annual Meeting in Boston on Friday, April 25 at 6:15 PM ET. This event was also livestreamed, and can be viewed below.

Judith Butler is 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. They are the author of several books; and their most recent book is Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024). Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages.

They served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. They also served as the Chair of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Center in Irvine. They were elected member of the Executive Council of the Modern Languages Association and chaired its committee on Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibilities before serving as President of the organization in 2020. They are also affiliated faculty with the Psychosocial MA Program at Birkbeck College University of London and teaches as the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Sass Fee, Switzerland. They have taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the New School University in 2020-2022. They were the intellectual in residence at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2023-24.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They have received 14 honorary degrees. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as Commandant. They served as well on the Advisory Committee of the Institute fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt. In 2015, they were made an “honorary geographer” by the American Association of Geographers and was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. They were also elected as member of the American Philosophical Society and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2022, they received the Catalonia International Prize from the canton of Catalunya and the gold medal from the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.