About Avital Ronell:
Avital Ronell is an American philosopher who contributes to the fields of continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a University Professor in the Humanities and in the Departments of Germanic Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at New York University where she co-directs the Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies Program. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, she teaches regularly at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Under the advisement of Stanley Corngold, Ronell received her Doctorate of Philosophy in German Studies from Princeton University in 1979 for a dissertation written on self-reflection in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Franz Kafka, but subsequently disclosed in interviews she had wanted Dictations: On Haunted Writing to serve as her dissertation.