The English Department is pleased to announce that our 2015 Yusko Ward-Phillips lecturer is Judith Butler. Professor Butler will speak at 7:00pm, Thursday April 9, in the McKenna Hall Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Co-director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as Founding Director. She is the author of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993). She was recently the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009–13). She received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of her contributions to feminist and moral philosophy as well as the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies.
She is as well the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the College des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Recently she was Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. She has received honorary degrees from Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University, and University of St. Andrews. In 2013 she was awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry.
The Ward-Phillips Lecture, organized and sponsored each year by the Department of English, honors two devoted and distinguished former professor of English at the University of Notre Dame: Leo L. Ward, C.S.C., and Charles Phillips. Rev. Ward taught at the university and received many honors as a writer of short fiction. A poet, critic, and playwright, Charles Phillips was a faculty member who was instrumental in developing the university’s theater program. The Ward-Phillips Lectures were inaugurated as a lecture series in 1966, and are generously funded by the Yusko Endowment for the Department of English. Past Yusko Ward-Phillips lecturers include Elie Wiesel, Cornel West, Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, Seamus Heaney, and Margaret Atwood.
Professor Butler’s appearance is funded by the Yusko Endowment for Excellence in English, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Provost’s Distinguished Women Lecturers Program. Additional sponsors include the American Studies Department; the Anthropology Department; the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre; the Gender Studies Program; the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; the Nanovic Institute for European Studies; the PhD in Literature Program; the Philosophy Department; and the Program of Liberal Studies.
Originally published at english.nd.edu.