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Photo: Mike Minehan

Professor of History, Brown University, Rhode Island

Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow - Class of Fall 2003


At the time of his fellowship, Michael P. Steinberg was the director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music at Brown University. He serves as associate editor of Musical Quarterly and Opera Quarterly. He has been a member of the executive board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and of the Board of Directors of the Barenboim-Said Foundation USA. He also served as a dramaturg to the co-production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan and the Staatsoper Berlin (2010-2013).
Steinberg was a member of the Cornell University Department of History between 1988 and 2005. Educated at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, he has been a visiting professor at these two schools as well as at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, in Paris, and National Tsing-hua University, in Taiwan.

 

His main research interests include the cultural history of modern Germany and Austria with particular attention to German-Jewish intellectual history and the cultural history of music. He has written and lectured widely on these topics for venues such as the New York Times, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Bard Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Salzburg Festival, and he serves as an advisor to the Teatro alla Scala, Milan, as well as the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin.

 

Steinberg’s books include Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Cornell, 2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele; Anton Pustet Verlag, 2000) won Austria’s Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. His other books are Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th-Century Music (Princeton, 2004); Reading Charlotte Salomon, co-edited with Monica Bohm-Duchen (Cornell, 2006); Judaism Musical and Unmusical (University of Chicago, 2007).

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