Jean Howard
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Jean E. Howard is a former Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history. Howard has authored over fifty essays; and her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007), which won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for the outstanding work of theater history for 2008, and Marx and Shakespeare in the Great Shakespeareans series (2012), co-written with Crystal Bartolovich. In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of The Norton Shakespeare, the third edition of which is now in preparation, and general editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. She has edited seven collections of essays and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, and Huntington, Folger, and Newberry Library Fellowships. A past President of the Shakespeare Association of America and an active member of many committees of the Modern Language Association, she currently serves as a Senator for the National Phi Beta Kappa organization and as Chair of its Visiting Scholar Committee. Howard has received several awards for the teaching and mentoring of graduate students and has directed over forty-five doctoral dissertations. As an administrator, Howard has served as a Trustee of Brown University and is currently Chair of Brown’s Presidential Diversity Advisory Council and Vice Chair of the Pembroke Center’s Associates’ Board. At Columbia she has served as Chair of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, as Columbia’s first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, and as Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. She has just completed a contextual edition of As You Like It and is turning the Schoff Lectures, which she delivered at Columbia, into a new book, Staging History, Writing the Nation that considers the work of contemporary playwrights Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill alongside Shakespeare’s history plays. She is planning a book on early modern tragedy.
Working Group Affiliations
Prison Education and Social Justice, Project Director
Engendering the Archive, Project Director
Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director
Women Mobilizing Memory, Project Director
Book Publications
Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 , University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Won the Barnard Hewitt award for Outstanding Theater History for 2008.
Marxist Shakespeares, Edited with Scott Shershow, Routledge, 2000
Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, Routledge, 1997
Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Edited with Marion O'Connor, Routledge, 1987
The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England, Routledge, 1994
Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response, University of Illinois Press, 1984.