Over the course of her career, Prudence Steiner has devoted her literary, educational, and philanthropic talents to Harvard University, as well as to a range of cultural and Jewish organizations. A 1958 graduate of Radcliffe College, Steiner later returned to the Harvard campus to complete her PhD in English and American literature in 1980. She taught in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Harvard Extension School, and became book review editor of the Harvard Review in 1994. Her many contributions to the Harvard–Radcliffe community have also included being president of the board of Harvard–Radcliffe Hillel and co-chair of the board of the Friends of the Harvard College Library. She is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Council for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Steiner is a Life Trustee of the New England Conservatory, a trustee of the Olive Tree Foundation, and was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Women’s Archive, which she chaired from 2010-2012. Her books include Rappaccini’s Family: The Mad Scientist Figure in the Writing of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and a 2008 translation of Moliere’s Tartuffe from the original French.