Avital Ronell (Prague, April 15, 1952) is an American philosopher who has contributed to the fields of continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, philosophical feminism, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a university professor of humanities. and is in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at New York University where she co-directs the Program for Transdisciplinary Studies in Trauma and Violence. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, she teaches regularly at the European Graduate School in Saas- Fee. Under the guidance of Stanley Corngold, he received his PhD in German studies from Princeton University in 1979 for a dissertation written on self-reflection on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka, but has subsequently become known in interviews that he would have wanted Dictations: On Haunted Writing to serve as his thesis
In August 2018, she was charged with repeated sexual harassment and abuse of dominance by Nimrod Reitman, her student at the time, and following an investigation by the Title IX office, NYU's academic sex crimes office. , was found responsible for the charge of sexual harassment, and suspended from said institution, for one year.
She is widely regarded as "one of the most original, bold and surprising" thinkers "in contemporary scholarship" and "the foremost thinker of the repressed conditions of knowledge...with Nietzsche's audacity...[to] probe the philosophical no man's land". Jean-Luc Nancy and Suzanne Doppelt. His research ranges from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe —who dictated haunted writing and psychoanalysis—, Alexander Graham Bell —who established electronic transmission systems in the 20th century—, the structure of the test in the legal, pharmaceutical, artistic, scientific, Zen, and historical domains, to twentieth-century literature and philosophy on stupidity, the disappearance of authority, childhood, and impaired diction.
She is a founding editor of Qui Parle magazine and a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace. In 1983, she wrote one of the first critical investigations to theorize the AIDS crisis, and in 1992 a critique of the second police brutality against Rodney King, later Artforum magazine called it "the most illuminating essay on television and video ever written." She received the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship from 1981-1983, the American Cultures Fellowship in 1991, the Research Fellow Award in 1993, and the University of California President's Fellowship from 1995-1996. She served as Division President of Philosophy and Letters and the Division of Comparative Literature at the Modern Language Association 1993-1996, and was awarded one of two top addresses at the annual meeting of the American Association for Comparative Literature in 2012.
