Contact Information
msteiner@fullerton.edu
Voice: 657-278-3640
Fax: 657-278-5820
Dept: 657-278-2441
Department of American Studies California State University, Fullerton Fullerton, CA 92834-6868
Michael C. Steiner, Ph. D
Emeritus Professor of American Studies
BIOGRAPHY
Instructor of English and American Literature, Carleton College, 1971-72
Teaching Associate & Instructor, American Studies, Univ. of Minnesota, 1973-74.
Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor, California State University, Fullerton Department, 1975-present.
Graduate Advisor, 1989-95. Department Chair, 1995-1998, Department Graduate Advisor, 2009-2012.
DEGREES
1978, Ph.D in American Studies , University of Minnesota
1971, M.A. in American Studies, University of Minnesota
1969, B.A in English, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
RESEARCH AREAS
American regionalism, folk culture, architecture, environmental history, and the built environment. Relationship between cultural geography, Americna studies, and theories of space and place. History and culture of the American West and California; International American Studies.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
AMST 201: Introduction to American Studies
AMST 301: The American Character
AMST 350: Seminar in Theory and Method California Cultures
AMST 401: American Culture and Nature
AMST 404: Americans and Nature
AMST 416: Southern California Culture
AMST 440: American Folk Culture
AMST 444: The Built Environment
AMST 502: Graduate Seminar: American Space, Place, and Architecture
Honors 201A:Honors Seminar: American Institutions and Values to 1900
Honors 201B: Honors Seminar: American Institutions and Values Since 1900
Courses Taught as Distinguished Fulbright Chair, 1998-99, and as Visiting Lecturer, January 2001, North American Studies Department University of Debrecen:
American Regionalism American
Folk Culture American Architecture
American Culture & Nature
Theories and Methods of AMST: Doctoral
Frontier & Region in Am. History: Doctoral (Jan. 2001)
Courses Taught as Distinguished Fulbright Chair, Lublin, Poland, Spring 2004:
American Culture and Nature
California Cultures
American Regionalism
PUBLICATIONS
Region and Regionalism in the United States: A Source Book for the Humanities and Social Sciences. New York: Garland Publishers, 1988. Coauthored with Clarence Mondale.
Mapping American Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Coedited with Wayne Franklin.
Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Coedited with David Wrobel.
Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices From the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.
"The Significance of Turner's Sectional Thesis." Western Historical Quarterly 10 (October, 1979): 437-66
"Regionalism in the Great Depression." Geographical Review 73 (October, 1983): 439-46.
"From Frontier to Region: Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Western History."Pacific Historical Review, 64 (November 1995): 479-501.
"Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney's Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West," Montana; The Magazine of Western History, 48 (Spring 1998): 2-17.
“Knowing the Place for the First Time: Discovering America by Teaching American Studies Abroad,” America Studies Association Newsletter, 23 (December 2000), 1, 10-11.
“Parables of Stone and Steel: Architectural Images of Nostalgia and Progress at the Columbian Exposition and Disneyland,” American Studies, 42 (Spring 2001): 39-67.
“Robert Hine, Sense of Place, and the Terrain of Western History,” Pacific Historical Review, 70 (August 2001): 453-63.
"Frederick Jackson Turner and Western Regionalism,” in Richard Etulain, ed. Writing Western History: Essays on Classic Western Historians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991, 103-35.
“The Politics of Place: Carey McWilliams and Radical Regionalism,” in Jeff Roche, ed.The Political Culture of the New West. Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2008, 135-65.
"Regionalism," in John Mack Faragher, ed., American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1998, 774-76.
"Sectionalism," in Faragher, ed., American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1998, 833-34.
“The Frontier Thesis,” in George Kurian, general editor, The Encyclopedia of American Studies, New York: Grollier Publishers, 2001, Vol. II, 217-18.
Preface to Lance Bernard, Architecture and Regional Identity in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1870-1970 Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007, i-ix.
"Pleasures and Perils of Nostalgia in Local History." Journal of Orange County Studies 2 (Spring, 1989): 46-48.
"Reading the Citrus Landscape." California History, 74 (Spring 1995): 112-17.
“Teaching California with Carey McWilliams, Ray Bradbury, and Yi-Fu Tuan,”California History 87 (Winter 2009).
“Region, Regionalism, and Place,” in Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott Casper eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, Vol 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 275-288.
"Utopias West: Or the Trouble with Perfection," American Studies, 53 (2014): 183-193.
"Mary C. Turpie," Encyclopedia of American Studies. (1,500 word biographical entry).
GRANTS & SPECIAL PROJECTS
Mary C. Turpie Award, 2006, American Studies Association, national award for outstanding achievement in teaching, advisement, and program building in American Studies.
Oscar O. Winther Award, Western Historical Association, 1979, for the best article of the year, Western Historical Quarterly.
Vivian A. Paladin Award, Montana Historical Society, 1998, for best article of the year, Montana: The Magazine of Western History.
President, California American Studies Association, 1991-92.
President, California American Studies Association, 2006-7.
Associate Editor, American Quarterly, 2012-present.
CSU Fullerton, campus-wide Alumni Distinguished Faculty Student Service Award, 1994-95.
Member, Graduate Education Committee, American Studies Association, 2011-present.
Member, International Committee of the American Studies Association, 2003-2006.
Member, Yasua Sakakibara Prize Committee, of the American Studies Association, 2003-4.
Chair, Mary C. Turpie Award Selection Committee, 2007-2010.
Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies, Debrecen, Hungary, 1998-1999.
Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies, Lublin, Poland, Spring 2004.
Keynote Addresses: Austrian Fulbright Annual Seminar, Altenmarkt, Austria, November 1998; Montana State Historical Society, October 1999; Conference for Teachers of American Studies in Torun,Poland, April 2004; Second Annual Yiddish Conference, Fullerton, California, October 2012; American Studies Student Association Colloquium, Fullerton, California, April 17, 2013.
Faculty advisor for four graduate students MA theses that won Fullerton’s campus-wide Giles T. Brown Award for outstanding thesis of the year: 1993, 1997, 2002, and 2010.
NCAA College Division All American Cross Country runner, 1968.
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION (Teaching and Scholarship):
American regionalism, folk culture, architecture, environmental history, and the built environment. Relationship between cultural geography, American studies, and theories of space and place. History and culture of the American West and California; International American Studies.
