Erwin Steinberg
Erwin Ray Steinberg was an American scholar and professor.
He began teaching at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now known as Carnegie Mellon University, in 1946, fresh from the U.S. Army Air Force. He was the dean of Carnegie Tech's Margaret Morrison Carnegie College from 1960 until it closed in 1973, and he was the first dean of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. He also held the Thomas S. Baker Professorship of English and Interdisciplinary Studies from 1981 to 1993, and in 1991 he was named Carnegie Mellon's first vice provost for education. In October 2006, at the 25th anniversary of the Master of Arts in Professional Writing Program that he helped found, Baker Hall A53 was named the Erwin R. Steinberg Auditorium in honor of his record of achievement and service to Carnegie Mellon. Then, at the age of 86 and after 60 years of teaching, he announced his retirement and taught his last classes in the Fall 2006 semester. He died of pneumonia in 2012.
Education
- Ph.D., New York University, 1956
- M.S., State University of New York, 1942
- B.S., State University of New York at Albany, 1941
Major research interests
- European novelists of the early twentieth century: esp. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Franz Kafka.
- Style, composition, assessment of the teaching of writing.
Recent Papers
- "Are Our Courses Working?", Written Communication 16, 39–50.
- "Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character Was Never ‘Prime Material for a Comedy,'" James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, 634–640.
- "Reading the Vision of Rudy Reading," James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 954–961.
- "The Source of Joyce's Anti-Semitism in Ulysses," Joyce Studies Annual, ed. Thomas Staley, 10, 63–84.