[1] Born in 1973 in Paris, an alumnus of the École normale supérieure, he is professor of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne Paris North University, editorial director of the collection "La République des idées" (Éditions du Seuil),[2] and one of the editors of the online magazine La Vie des Idées.

He received the Prix Médicis in 2016 for Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, « an openly feminist book » that tells the story of a young girl murdered at the age of 18,[4][5] His book History Is a Contemporary Literature (Cornell UP, 2018) offers perspectives on the writing of History, and the relationship between Literature and the social sciences.

Jablonka argues that History, along with Sociology and Anthropology, can "achieve greater rigor and wider audiences by creating a literary text, written and experienced through a broad spectrum of narrative modes and rhetorical figures".

[6] Conversely, a whole range of literary texts —travel logs, memoirs, autobiographies, testimonies, diaries, life stories, and news reports— can implement methods and lines of reasoning inspired by the social sciences.

His book A History of Masculinity: From Patriarchy to Gender Justice (Allen Lane, 2022) reimagines the cultures and norms that shape ideas of the “male self”.