Michael P. Steinberg is the Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Barnaby Conrad and Mary Critchfield Keeney Professor of History, and Professor of Music and German Studies at Brown University. He serves as Associate Editor of The Musical Quarterly and The Opera Quarterly. He is 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 serves 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. 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, Berlin. His books include Austria as Theater and Ideology: The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival (Cornell University Press, 2000), of which the German edition (Ursprung und Ideologie der Salzburger Festspiele; Anton Pustet Verlag, 2000) won Austria's Victor Adler Staatspreis in 2001. Recent books include Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and 19th- Century Music (Princeton University Press, 2004); Reading Charlotte Salomon , co-edited with Monica Bohm-Duchen (Cornell University Press, 2006); Judaism Musical and Unmusical (University of Chicago Press, 2007).