He was born in San Francisco, California, on June 8, 1953. He received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by M.A and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of California, Berkeley. At Illinois, he holds the position of Professor, Department of History at University of Illinois. He is also Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures there and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory ; from 1998 to 2004 he was Director of their Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center. From August 2006 until August 2013, he was the editor of the interdisciplinary journal Slavic Review. Before coming to Illinois in 1996, he was an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University from 1987 to 1989, and at Yale from 1989–1994, where he was promoted to Associate Professor.
Specialization
Mark Steinberg specializes on the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially the period of the Russian Revolution. His recent and current research focuses on urban history, revolutions, emotions, religion, violence, and utopias. He is currently working on a new project on “the crooked and the straight” in urban public life in Odessa, Bombay, and New York City during the 1920s and 1930s.
Publications
Books written
Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Mark D. Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle. Yale University Press, 2011.
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky and Mark D. Steinberg. A History of Russia, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, 2010
Mark D. Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. : 503
*Review: Canadian Slavonic papers. 47, no. 3, : 409
*Review: Social History. 29, Part 2 : 238
Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalëv, The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution. In the series Annals of Communism, Yale University Press, 1995.
**translated into Portuguese as, A queda dos Romanov : a história documentada do cativeiro e execução do último czar e sua família Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1996
Mark D. Steinberg and Valeria Sobol, eds., Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe. Northern Illinois University Press, 2011.
Mark D. Steinberg and Catherine Wanner, eds.Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Indiana University Press, 2008
Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J Coleman, eds. Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Indiana University Press, 2007.
*Review: Journal of modern history. 81, no. 1, : 241
*Review: American historical review. 112, no. 4, : 1296
Stephen Frank and Mark D Steinberg, eds. Cultures in Flux: Lower Class Values, Practices and Resistance in Late Imperial Russia. Princeton University Press, 1994..
Mark Steinberg was married to the late Jane T. Hedges, who for many years was Managing Editor of Slavic Review. Their only child is Alexander Hedges Steinberg, a cartoon artist and designer, as well as a celebrated drag queen performer who won the ninth season of American drag competition RuPaul's Drag Race.
