Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Martin Jay is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.  He received his B.A. from Union College and his Ph.D. in History at Harvard.  He is a leading scholar of European intellectual history, visual culture, and critical theory.  He is the author, most recently, of The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying and Politics.   He has recently returned from Germany, where he spent the Fall semester as a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.  

His influential study of the Frankfurt School between 1923 and 1950, The Dialectical Imagination, won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award from the American Historical Association Award for best first book in European history.  Dr. Jay has received prizes and fellowships from the Danforth Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the the Aby Warburg Foundation, among others. 

He is a regular contributor to Salmagundi, a quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences published by Skidmore College in New York.