Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984 on the French Reception of Hegel. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Judith Butler is the author of numerous books, articles and contributions on philosophy, feminism and queer theory. In 2011, she is ranked among the Guardian’s “Top 100 Women” and is described as a “superstar academic whose influential work Gender Trouble changed the way we conceptualise gender”.