Marshall Steinbaum

Marshall Steinbaum
Noted subjects	Geography, Economics, European History, Current Events, Haberdashery
Current college	Chicago (2009-)
Past colleges	Oxford
Stats	[1]] HDWhite] • [2]] NAQT]

Marshall Steinbaum was a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of Chicago from 2008 to 2014, although he only joined the quizbowl team in February of 2009 at the advice of his friend, later roommate, and onetime Maggie Walker and Harvard quizbowler Eric Nielsen.

Marshall filled the crucial role of Old Man of UChicago Quizbowl during the interstices between the joint reign of Seth Teitler and Selene Koo and the coming of John Lawrence. He contributed to third-place showings at ICT and ACF Nationals 2011 and led the A team to a fifth-place showing at ICT 2012 and a controversial second place at the inaugural collegiate National History Bowl in 2012.

Marshall head-edited three tournaments during his career at Chicago: Sack of Antwerp in 2011, Peaceful Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 2012 (co-edited with Ike Jose), and Urgent Call for Unity, the Chicago Open History Doubles tournament in the summer of 2013. His sometimes-contentious and often unsuccessful editing philosophy privileged real, especially academic knowledge and sometimes strained the received quizbowl distribution. His subject biases include a hatred for mythology, which he considers an amalgam of made-up bedtime stories and nationalistic dreck assembled to provide fake historicity to modern ethnocentric political claims, an abiding interest in making social history and historiography suitable subjects for quizbowl questions, and a belief that social science, especially economics, ought to be about recent cross-disciplinary empirically-oriented results rather than the contents of decades- if not centuries-old foundational tomes no one actually reads. In his final year at Chicago, Marshall was subject editor for History, Social Science, and "Modern World" for the 2014 tournament Cane Ridge Revival, which did a considerably better job translating his philosophy of proper quizbowl subject matter into playable questions.