REBECCA HALE
Assistant Reverb Editor
Anyone who knows anything about the Department of English — as well as many outside the department — here at Fredonia knows Dr. Theodore Steinberg. He has been a part of the Fredonia family for 44 years, and at the end of this semester, he will be saying goodbye to the university and hello to a new chapter in his life — retirement.
Dr. Steinberg has helped shape the English department into what it is today, as he created many of the courses that he has taught for years, such as medieval, renaissance, Greek and Roman literature. It’s Steinberg’s love of literature that influences his unique teaching style.
Any student who has taken a class of Steinberg’s can quote his catch phrase, taken from Philip Sidney: “Literature should both teach and delight.”
“I truly believe that if you study literature in the right way, it should make you a better person,” Steinberg said.
Going along with literature, Steinberg also has a passion for language and can read and write in many languages, including Hebrew and Greek. He attributes his passions to a former teacher from when he was very young.
“In the second year of middle school, I had a really good English teacher, and she got me hooked,” Steinberg explained. “She just was so enthusiastic about literature, and I sort of fell in love with language. I thought it’d be nice to spend my life with books.”
That was when Steinberg decided to devote his life not only to teaching but also learning.
“I have a wide range of interests: literature, language, science, music, politics. I try to do some of everything,” he said. Steinberg also has a great passion for music, both listening and playing. He plays piano, and he used to play viola — something he says he wants to take up again in his retirement.
Some students who may not know Steinberg well may also find it surprising to know that he has also written six books, mostly about literature. He is currently working on a seventh, about Yiddish literature, that he hopes to finish within four years.
Steinberg has taught exclusively at Fredonia; he began working here immediately after receiving his degree from Johns Hopkins University and his Doctorate from the University of Illinois. Steinberg says he never had a need to teach elsewhere, because he loves Fredonia.
“One of the things I really like the most [about Fredonia] is the sense of community we have here among faculty and students and even the administration,” Steinberg said. “Our students are just good people.”
Still, though, he feels guilty about retiring and leaving behind so much, Steinberg said, “It’s just time to make room for other people.”
He has three children and five grandchildren, who live in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. He plans to spend more time visiting them, as well as traveling with his wife to places like Costa Rica, Israel, Greece, Italy and Scandinavia.
Just one example of how Steinberg has impacted his students is senior English major, Ricky Nolan, who recently changed his major from international studies after taking a class with Steinberg. Nolan is currently taking three of Steinberg’s classes.
“I want to get my Ph.D. in English and medieval renaissance studies, and I want to teach at a collegiate level because of him,” Nolan said. “How I see myself teaching is going to be very similar to how he teaches.”
Nolan said he loves Steinberg’s open-discussion style of teaching, and the way in which he engages his students, even in a class like Epic and Romance, in which many students dread reading texts like The Iliad or The Odyssey.
“Steinberg incorporates so much more. He was the one who made me aware that you can tie so much more into literature that just looking at the text itself.”
Nolan knows that the department won’t be the same without Steinberg, but he hopes that if he ever returns to Fredonia to teach, he can fill Steinberg’s medieval literature shoes.
“I think there’s going to be a big vacancy,” Nolan said. “ No one approaches the material in the same way; no one carries the same focus that he does.”
Nonetheless, in his 44 years here at Fredonia, Dr. Steinberg has striven for and achieved instilling in his students, “a love of learning, and [the ability to] turn that learning into action.”