Ellen FitzSimmons Steinberg

Ellen F. Steinberg was born and raised in Chicago, and currently lives in River Forest, Illinois. Steinberg holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has authored a number of scholarly articles related to her anthropological work. Her most recent anthropological research was featured in the video, “Mystery of the Skulls,” aired numerous times on the Discovery Channel during 2000 and 2001.

She is also the author of four multi-disciplinary books. Teach Me: An Ethnography of Adolescent Learning (1999) grew out of her dissertation research with children living in Chicago’s ghettos, and documents what the children want to know, why, and how they go about learning it; Irma: A Chicago Woman’s Story 1871-1966 (2004) is based on the diaries and later memoirs of Irma Rosenthal Frankenstein, a Chicago-born Jewish woman of German descent that were set into historical and socio-economic context, Learning to Cook in 1898: A Chicago Culinary Memoir (2007), based on Frankenstein’s manuscript cookbook, and set into the socio-cultural and economic context of Nineteenth Century German-Jewish community in Chicago, and From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways (2011), the inaugural volume of the Heartland Foodways series at the University of Illinois. Her manuscript about Midwestern German Foodways is currently under review. She has also published two articles on culinary-related topics: “A Menu and A Mystery: The Case of the 1834 Delmonico Bill of Fare”(Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture (Spring 2008), and a lengthy book review on Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History.

Steinberg has been interviewed on a number of radio programs related to her anthropological work and her books. She occasionally teaches at local colleges and universities as a visiting professor, and has been an invited lecturer for a number of organizations. Steinberg is a past President of Yonah Hadassah, the woman’s charitable Zionist organization, and immediate past-Vice-President and Chicago-area chair of the Society of Woman Geographers. In keeping with her strong commitment to community service, she has mentored three young adults for the past ten years she met during the course of her dissertation research. Steinberg also gardens. Her garden was featured in Chicagoland Gardening magazine (May-June, 2004), and The Forest Leaves (July, 2005).