Avital Ronell

Avital Ronell is the Jacques Derrida Chair at the European Graduate School. A courageous philosopher who did post-doctoral work in Paris and Germany, she is a noted cultural critic admired as the “black lady of deconstruction” and an “ivory-tower terrorist.” She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches German and comparative literature and theory at NYU. Avital Ronell bridges the European and American theory traditions and has contributed to the deconstructive reading of technology and communication as well as ethics and aesthetics. She is the author of Telephone Book (1989), Dictations: On Haunted Writing (1993), Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (1993),Stupidity (2001), The Test Drive (2005), and recently, in 2007, The Über Reader (ed. Diane Davis).