Mark Steinberg has taught at Harvard and Yale universities and, from 1996 to 2021, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He specializes on the cultural, intellectual, and social history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His recent and current writing focuses on urban history, revolutions, emotions, religion, violence, space, and utopias. He is the author of a number of books and many articles and completed a video/audio lecture series, "A History of Russia: From Peter the Great to Gorbachev" for The Teaching Company. His most recent books are "The Russian Revolution, 1905-21" and "Russian Utopia: A Century of Revolutionary Possibilities." He is currently working on a new project on urban public life in New York City, Odessa, and Bombay in the 1920s and 1930s. 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 also the father of the drag queen and artist Sasha Velour. He currently lives in New York City and Pianezza, Italy.
