Archives
History professor named Guggenheim Fellow
Andrea Lynn,
Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
Released
4/16/07
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
A University of Illinois history professor has won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.
Mark Steinberg, a professor of modern Russian history, has been appointed
a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow on the basis of his “distinguished achievement
in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment,”
according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
He was among 189 artists, scholars and scientists who were named winners
on April 5.
Steinberg won for his proposal to write a book about St. Petersburg,
Russia, in the “years of crisis” between two revolutions
– those of 1905 and of 1917 – “as a site to explore
Russian history in a critical era, but also to explore a particular
location and instance of the modern age and how it was experienced,
interpreted and negotiated,” he said.
The book will be titled, “St. Petersburg Fin de Siècle:
Landscapes of the Darkening Modern, 1905-1917.”
Steinberg said that in the book he plans to explore journalism, cultural
criticism, literature and art, among other evidence, as “windows
into both the actual textures of everyday urban life and how ‘the
times’ were viewed and comprehended.”
Topics he will take up include ideas of modern crisis in a comparative
context; the “imperial metropolis,” including economic and
social development and cultural images of urban life; city streets,
including spectacle, danger and crime and their interpretation; “black
masks,” meaning disguise, deception and uncertainty; death and
suicide as “social phenomena and interpretive touchstones”;
melancholy of public emotions and efforts to “overcome the darkness
of melancholy”; the “poetics of the modern,” especially
in the literary work of Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, as well as visual
imagery of the city.
Steinberg already has completed most of his research for the book in
St. Petersburg, but with the fellowship funds, he will make one more
visit to that city to obtain photographs from the Petersburg archive
of photography to use in his book.
Steinberg specializes in the cultural, intellectual and social history
of Russia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His research interests
have focused on labor and business history, revolution, the monarchy,
urban history, worker poetry, visuality, and the development of moral,
social, religious and political ideas and values.
He is author, co-author, editor or co-editor of nine books, including
the most recent, “Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in
Modern Russia,” co-edited with Heather Coleman. He has published
dozens of articles in scholarly journals in both English and in Russian.
Steinberg also is the author of “A History of Russia: From Peter
the Great to Gorbachev,” a 36-lecture video/audio course with
supplementary booklets.
In 2006, he was named editor of the interdisciplinary journal Slavic
Review, which has had its editorial offices on the U. of I. campus since
1996.
Steinberg has received at least 10 other major research fellowships
and grants from the U. of I. and from external sources, such as the
Carnegie Corp., the International Research and Exchanges Board, the
U.S. Department of Education and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
At Illinois, Steinberg teaches courses on all periods of Russian history,
as well as comparative urban history and European popular culture. He
has won several major awards for his excellence in teaching at Illinois.
Steinberg joined the history department in 1996, and he also is a professor
in the Slavic languages and literatures department and the Unit for
Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He was director of Illinois’
Russian, East European and Eurasian Center from 1998 to 2004.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California
at Santa Cruz and his doctorate from the University of California at
Berkeley.
Prior to coming to Illinois, Steinberg taught at the University of Oregon
at Eugene and at Harvard and Yale universities. He also has worked in
New York City in the 1970s as a taxi driver and a printer’s apprentice.
