Martin Jay
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Martin Jay (born 1944) is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a renowned Intellectual Historian and his research interests have been groundbreaking in connecting history with other academic and intellectual activities, such as the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, other figures and methods in continental Social Theory, Cultural Criticism, and Historiography among many others.
He 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 that were crucial to Jay's research (Löwenthal would later chair the Sociology department at Berkeley). His book is considered one of the most influential works in exposing the American Academy to the theoretical insight of the Frankfurt School. His work since then continued to explore the many nuances of Marxism/Socialism, as well as exploring new territory in Historiography and Cultural Criticism, Visual Culture, and the place of Post-Structuralism/Post-Modernism in European Intellectual History. His current research is on Lying in Politics.
He also has a regular column in the quarterly journal Salmagundi.
He is the husband of literary critic Catherine Gallagher.
[edit] Further reading
- 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-50
- 1984 Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas
- 1984 Adorno
- 1985 Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America
- 1988 Fin-de-Siécle Socialism and Other Essays
- 1993 Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Criticism
- 1993 Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
- 1998 Cultural Semantics: Keywords of the Age
- 2003 Refractions of Violence
- 2004 Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
