Mark D. Steinberg

Mark Steinberg is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previous taught at Harvard and Yale universities. He is the author and editor of books and articles on the Russian revolution, urban history, religion, emotions, popular culture, and utopias, including Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925 (Cornell 2002), Petersburg Fin-de-Sičcle (Yale 2011), The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 (Oxford 2017), A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky (Oxford 7th through 10th editions [2025]), Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities (Bloomsbury 2021--A Choice Academic Book winner), Moral Storytelling in 1920s New York, Odessa, and Bombay: Sex, Crime, Violence, and Nightlife in the Modern City (Bloomsbury 2025), and the 10th edition of A History of Russia with Nicholas Riasanovsky. He lives in Brooklyn New York and Turin Italy. His current research project is tentatively called Migrant Stories: A Speculative and Personal Global History, 1850-1950 focused around Jewish migrant lives in Poland, Ukraine, England, Canada, China, and the United States.. He was born in San Francisco and received his B.A. from U.C. Santa Cruz and his doctoral degree from U.C. Berkeley. He has also worked in New York City in the 1970s as a taxi driver and as a printer's apprentice. He is the father of the drag queen and artist Sasha Velour.