Introduction
Martin E. Jay (born 1944) is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an intellectual historian whose research interests have connected history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
Career
Jay received his B.A. from Union College in 1965. In 1971, he completed his Ph.D. in History at Harvard under the tutelage of H. Stuart Hughes. His dissertation was later revised into the book The Dialectical Imagination, which covers the history of the Frankfurt School from 1923-1950. While he was conducting research for his dissertation, he established a correspondence and friendship with many of the members of the Frankfurt School. He was closest to Leo Löwenthal, who had provided him access to personal letters and documents for his research. Jay's work since then has explored Marxism, socialism, historiography, cultural criticism, visual culture, and the place of post-structuralism and post-modernism in European intellectual history. His current research is nominalism and photography. He is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.
He also has a regular column in the quarterly journal Salmagundi.
Personal life
Jay is Jewish and is the husband of literary critic Catherine Gallagher.