Mark D. Steinberg
Mark D. Steinberg (born June 8, 1953) is an American academic and historian who is a history professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Early life and education. He was born in San Francisco, California. He received a B.A. (1978) from the University of California, Santa Cruz, followed by M.A (1982) and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in history from the University of California, Berkeley. At Illinois, from 1996 until his retirement in 2021, he held the position of Professor, Department of History at University of Illinois. He was also Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and  Literatures there (since 2005) and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory (since 2007); 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 (1994–96). 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. Personal life. Mark Steinberg was married from 1980 until her death in 2015 to Jane T. Hedges, who for many years was Managing Editor of "Slavic Review" (previously working in university book publishing as an editor). Their only child is Alexander (Sasha) Hedges Steinberg, a cartoon artist and designer , as well as a celebrated drag queen performer (under the name Sasha Velour) who won the ninth season of American drag competition "RuPaul's Drag Race". In 2020, he married Daniela Steila, who teaches history of philosophy at the University of Turin in Italy.