Jay Gitlin is an American historian. He is a professor of North American history at Yale University, associate director of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers & Borders, and an expert on French North American history. He is also the Coordinator of the Committee on Canadian Studies at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, a faculty affiliate of the Yale University Native American Cultural Center, and founder of the Yale Journal of Canadian Studies.
Gitlin received his BA, MM, and PhD degrees at Yale University.
Gitlin won the 2010 Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize for the best book in French colonial history from the French Colonial Historical Society for his book The Bourgeois Frontier.