Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is the Maxine Elliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, and her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s, between different teaching/research appointments (such as at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University), she was involved in post-structuralist efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism. Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, engaging in particular with "pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence."