S. Frederick Starr is a historian and jazz musician. Educated at Yale, Cambridge University, and Princeton, he was the founding secretary of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at The Wilson Center in Washington and served for eleven years as president of Oberlin College in Ohio. In addition to his writings on Soviet and Russian affairs, he has taken an active role in Russian-American relations and served in various advisory capacities to the United States government. Most recently, he is the author of a major biography of the American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk.