Avital Ronell is an American academic who writes about continental philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the humanities and in the departments of Germanic languages and literature and comparative literature at New York University. As Jacques Derrida Professor of Philosophy, Ronell also teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee. Ronell was born in Prague to Israeli diplomats and was a performance artist before entering academia. She emigrated