Paul Jay

Paul Jay was born and raised in Los Angeles and did his undergraduate work at UCLA and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his MA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a doctorate in literature in 1980 from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at Caltech, Emory University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Chicago, and is currently Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, where he has taught since 1985. His books include Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Cornell UP, 1984), The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley (Viking, 1998, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in biography), and Contingency Blues: The Search for Foundations in American Criticism (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1997), Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies (Cornell UP, 2010), The Humanities "Crisis" and the Future of Literary Studies (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), and, most recently, Transnational Literature: The Basics (Routledge, 2021). His essays on literary and cultural theory, modern and contemporary literature, globalization, and border studies have appeared in academic journals including PMLA, Callaloo, Cultural Critique, and Modern Fiction Studies.