Robert A. Rosenstone

Brief Bio - Robert A. Rosenstone Robert A. Rosenstone has published 15 books in a variety of genres – history, biography, fiction, criticism, and poetry. A Professor of History (now emeritus) at the California Institute of Technology for half a century, he is the leading international scholar in fast growing field devoted to studying the relationship between history and the visual media, a field he helped to pioneer after spending seven years as historical consultant on Warren Beatty’s Oscar-winning film, Reds. Rosenstone has worked as consultant and writer on half a dozen other films, both dramatic features and documentaries, and has written two books on the topic of film as history: Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Harvard, 1995), and History on Film / Film on History (Pearson, 2006). Earlier in his career he published two works on social, artistic, and political radicalism: Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (Pegasus, 1969), and Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (Knopf, 1975), which Beatty used as the basis of Reds. He also produced an innovative narrative about Americans who lived and worked in nineteenth century Japan entitled Mirror in the Shrine (Harvard, 1988). Rosenstone is also the author of several works of fiction, including a book of stories, The Man Who Swam into History: The (Mostly) True Story of my Jewish Family (Texas, 2002), a historical novel based on the life of Russian writer Isaac Babel, King of Odessa (Northwestern, 2003), and a novel set in contemporary Spain, Red Star, Crescent Moon: A Muslim - Jewish Love Story (Scarith Press, 2008). His book of poetry, Do People Look Up at the Moon Anymore? (Sharq Press) was published in 2015. As part of his teaching career, Rosenstone has been a visiting professor at Oxford University, the University of Manchester, St Andrews University, the University of Barcelona, the European University Institute (Florence), Kyushu University (Japan), the University of La Laguna (Canary Islands), and Tolima University (Colombia). He has been awarded four scholarships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, three from the Fulbright program, and has been a research fellow at both the East-West Center (Honolulu) and the Getty Research Institute. His books and essays have been translated into 11 languages -- French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Polish, German, Hungarian, Korean, Japanese, and Hebrew. He has lectured at more than 50 universities on six continents.