Martin Evan 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. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical
Society in 2019.

Career
Jay received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Union College in 1965. In 1971, he
completed his Doctor of Philosophy degree in history at Harvard University 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 to 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 focused on 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 was born on May 4, 1944, in New York City. He is Jewish. He married the
literary critic Catherine Gallagher circa 1973.

Published works
• 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923-50
• “The Concept of Totality in Lukács and Adorno”. Telos 32 (Summer 1977).
New York: Telos Press.
• 1984 Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to
Habermas
• 1984 Adorno. Fontana Modern Masters.
• 1985 Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany
to America
• 1988 Fin-de-Siècle 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
• 2010 The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
• 2011 Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena
• 2016 Reason after Its Eclipse: On Late Critical Theory