Jay, Martin 1944-

(Martin Evan Jay)

PERSONAL: Born May 4, 1944, in New York, NY; son of Edward (an advertising executive) and Sari (a teacher; maiden name, Sidel) Jay; married Mary Catherine Sullivan Gallagher, July 6, 1974; children: Margaret Shana Gallagher (stepdaughter), Rebecca Erin Jay (daughter). Education: Attended London School of Economics and Political Science, London, 1963–64; Union College, Schenectady, NY, B.A., 1965; Harvard University, Ph.D., 1971.

ADDRESSES: Home—Berkeley, CA. Office—Department of History, 3229 Dwinelle Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720; fax: 510-643-5323. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and educator. University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor, 1971–76, associate professor, 1976–82, Sidney Hellman Ehrman professor of history, 1982–, department chair, 1998–2001. Senior associate of St. Antony's College, Oxford, 1974–75; visiting fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1989; nonresident fellow, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, 1989; Mellon Professor, Tulane University, 1990; Townsend Center for the Humanities fellow, University of California, Berkeley, 1991–92.

MEMBER: American Historical Association, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy of Literary Studies, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: Woodrow Wilson fellowship, 1965–66; Danforth Foundation fellowship, 1965–71; Herbert Baxter Adams Award from American Historical Association, 1973, for best first book in European history; University of California Regents' Summer Faculty Fellowship, 1973; Guggenheim fellowship, 1974–75; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1974–75, 1978–79, and 1979–80 (none accepted); Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, 1984–85; Humanities Research fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 1988; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1989–90; Humanities Research fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 1993–94; University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 1993–94; Stanford Humanities Center, fellow, 1997–98; Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, Princeton, 2001–02; Aby Warburg Foundation, Hamburg, Germany, science prize, 2003.

WRITINGS:

The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973, 2nd edition, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

Adorno (biography), Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1984.

Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1984.

Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Immigration from Germany to America, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

(Editor and author of introduction) An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1987.

Fin-de-Siecle Socialism and Other Essays, Routledge (New York, NY), 1988.

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.

Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, Routledge (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor, with Anton Kaes and Edward Dimendberg) The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1994.

(Editor, with Teresa Brennan) Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, Routledge (New York, NY), 1996.

Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1998.

Refractions of Violence, Routledge (New York, NY), 2003.

Songs of Experience: Modern America and European Variations on a Universal Theme, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2005.

Contributor to history and sociology journals. Author of regular column for Salmagundi. Member of editorial board of Theory and Society and Cultural Critique.

SIDELIGHTS: Martin Jay, a scholar who has taught at colleges and universities, including Harvard, Cornell, Tulane, and Cambridge, is also a historian with interests in visual culture, critical theory, and European intellectual history.

Jay explores in depth the ideas of visual culture in French intellectual history in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Jay considers "important aspects of contemporary thought through its insistence on the central thematic or problematic of vision in the work of twentieth-century French intellectuals," noted reviewer David Carroll in the Modern Language Quarterly. Western culture, Jay notes, has subscribed to considerable and ongoing ocularcentrism, "that culture's privileging of sight, and to its parallel downgrading of other senses like touch, hearing, and smell," reported Philippe Carrard in Clio. Jay's work "narrates how the French have lifted their eyes up to observe how the eye has been used to look down on the other senses and shows how they have looked to undermine the eye of speculative philosophy and idealism, of the dominant male gaze, of imaginary constructs and ego ideals, and of naive realism and ideology, to make possible more diversified, critical approaches to the visual," Carroll stated. The book's "central premise is quite simple: within contemporary French philosophy one can identify not only a concern with the assumed ocularcentrism of the modern world, but a profound hostility to vision as well," commented Douglas Fogle in Afterimage. The material that Jay relies upon to support his analysis is "both rich and complex," Carrard stated. It includes works from creative artists such Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton, psychoanalysts such as Irigaray and Lacan, literary critics such as Barthes, and numerous philosophers, such as Derrida, Foucault, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others. Jay covers interpretations of vision in contemporary French culture and theory; the role of vision and the interpretation of vision in important intellectual eras such as the Enlightenment; antiocularcentrism and the denigration of vision in French thought and other intellectual traditions; ocularcenrism in Greek thought; feminist theory and ocularcentrism; vision as a philosophical construct; postmodernism and antiocular-centrism; and much more. Jay's work has "enlightened us to both the critical possibilities and the limitations of enlightenment itself and to have led us to see what cannot be seen by eyes that take seeing for granted and continue to privilege sight over the other senses," Carroll concluded.

Jay is an "intellectual historian of the first order" who has "produced an exhaustively researched study that provides the student of the visual with a useful introduction to this topic," Fogle concluded. Jay's "very readable book is the latest major contribution to this lively discussion from a historian of ideas," commented Margaret Iversen in the Art Bulletin. W. J. T. Mitchell, reviewing the book in Artforum International, remarked that Jay's work is "the most comprehensive treatment of Western visuality now available," and is "surely destined to be one of the basic books in the new history of visuality."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Afterimage, November-December, 1995, Douglas Fogle, review of Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, p. 18.

Art Bulletin, December, 1994, Margaret Iversen, review of Downcast Eyes, pp. 730-732.

Artforum International, January, 1994, W.J.T. Mitchell, review of Downcast Eyes, pp. 9-10.

Clio, spring, 1995, Philippe Carrard, review of Downcast Eyes, pp. 327-330.

Modern Language Quarterly, December, 1995, David Carroll, review of Downcast Eyes, pp. 487-509.

ONLINE

University of California, Berkeley, Department of History Web site, http://history.berkeley.edu/ (February 27, 2006), curriculum vitae of Martin Jay.