Zara Steiner
Zara Alice Steiner, was an American-born British historian and academic.
Biography
Born on 6 November 1928 in Manhattan, New York City, Zara Alice Shakow was the daughter of Frances and Joseph Shakow. She was of Lithuanian-Jewish descent through her father, who was an outfitter who provided equipment to polar explorers, and her mother was a homemaker. Shakow was a 1948 graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and gained bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oxford in 1950 and 1954 respectively. Tutored by both AJP Taylor and Isaiah Berlin, she asked the former to be her doctoral supervisor, but Taylor disapproved of the PhD, which he did not consider worthwhile. She received a doctorate in History from Harvard in 1957.Steiner specialised in foreign relations, international relations and 20th-century history of Europe and of the United States. Richard J. Evans described her two volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe as "standard works" on international diplomacy between both world wars.
From 1968 to 1995, Steiner was a Fellow of New Hall of Cambridge University. In 2007, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the UK's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
She married the literary critic and scholar George Steiner in 1955. The couple were introduced by their respective Harvard professors who knew both of them. They had two children. George Steiner died on 3 February 2020, and Zara Steiner died from pneumonia at their Cambridge home ten days later, aged 91.