James Steichen is the author of Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2018), a history of choreographer George Balanchine’s first decade in the United States named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Opera Quarterly, and The Yale Review. 

He has given lectures for the School of American Ballet and San Francisco Ballet and was a featured guest on the podcast The Turning: Room of Mirrors. He is the translator (German-English), of Music of the Renaissance: Imagination and Reality of a Cultural Practice (University of California Press, 2018), essays for The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (2015), and a commemorative volume for the reopening of the Zurich Tonhalle (Baerenreiter, 2021).

Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he received a BA from the University of Virginia and holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a PhD in historical musicology from Princeton University. He has taught courses at Princeton, Columbia University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Stanford University, where he was a lecturer for ITALIC (Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture) from 2015-17. He was a quarterfinalist in the 1999 Jeopardy! Teen Tournament and is an Eagle Scout.

Steichen’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright program, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society for American Music (Virgil Thomson Fellowship), and the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Howard D. Rothschild Fellowship in Dance). His research has been published in the Journal of Musicology, Dance Research Journal, Music and the Moving Image, and Dance Chronicle.

An arts administrator and fundraiser, Steichen has worked at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and is currently a fundraiser for the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, with a special focus on the Stanford Humanities Center and Public Humanities. He lives in San Francisco.

Employment

Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences, Associate Director of Development, Humanities, April 2023-

San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Director of Individual Giving and Principal Gifts, 2018-23

Stanford University, ITALIC (Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture), Lecturer, 2015-17

John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Office of Development, 2001-2006

Education

PhD • Princeton University • 2014

MA • University of Chicago • 2007

BA  • University of Virginia • 1999 with High Distinction

Awards and Other

Virgil Thomson Fellowship, Society for American Music, 2015

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow, 2013–14

Howard D. Rothschild Fellowship, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 2012–13

School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, 2010

Fulbright Scholars Program, Germany, 1999-2001

Echols Scholar, University of Virginia, 1995–99

Jeopardy! Teen Tournament, 1995