ARTIST PROFILE

R.Jay Magill, Jr. is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The American Interest, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Prospect, Foreign Policy, Spiegel Online, The Believer, and Print, among other periodicals and books. He holds a B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and an M.A. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University in New York, where he was the Managing Editor of the journal Art Criticism.

Magill received a PhD in American Studies from the University of Hamburg, in Germany, in October 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of Lüneburg and at Harvard University, where he received the Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching. He also served as Executive Editor and a staff writer at the National Magazine Award-winning quarterly of photography and journalism, DoubleTake.

Magill's first book, Chic Ironic Bitterness, about irony in America, was published in September 2007 by the University of Michigan Press.

He lives in Berlin.