| Martin Jay | |
| Birth Name: | Martin Evan Jay |
| Birth Date: | 4 May 1944 |
| Birth Place: | New York City, New York, US |
| Other Names: | Martin E. Jay |
| Spouse: | Catherine Gallagher ( ) |
| Thesis Title: | Frankfurt School[1] |
| Thesis Year: | 1971 |
| Doctoral Advisor: | H. Stuart Hughes |
| Discipline: | History |
| Sub Discipline: | Intellectual history |
| Workplaces: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Notable Works: | The Dialectical Imagination (1973) |
Martin Evan Jay (born May 4, 1944) is an American intellectual historian whose research interests connected history with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, social theory, cultural criticism, and historiography.
He is currently the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019.
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 Frankfurt School members. Leo Löwenthal 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.
Jay was born on May 4, 1944, in New York City.[2] He is Jewish.[3] He married English professor and literary critic Catherine Gallagher circa 1973; they met in 1970 at Berkeley when she was an English graduate student and he was an assistant professor of history.[4]