Jean E. Howard

Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University where she taught early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, theater history, and American literature of incarceration. Howard has authored over fifty essays; 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; Marx and Shakespeare in the Great Shakespeareans series (2012), co-written with Crystal Bartolovich; and King Lear: Language and Writing (2022). In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of The Norton Shakespeare and general editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare for which with Pamela Allen Brown she edited As You Like It. She has edited seven collections of essays and has received Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Huntington, Folger, and Newberry Library Fellowships. Howard has received several awards for the teaching and mentoring of graduate students and has directed over fifty doctoral dissertations. She is completing another book, Staging History: Forging the Body Politic, that considers the different genealogies of the history play in America and England in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It will be published by Columbia University Press. Howard regularly teaches at Taconic Women’s Correctional Facility as part of Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education initiative. At Columbia she has served as Chair of the English Department, Chair of the Gender Institute, and was the university’s first Vice Provost for Diversity. She is a Trustee Emerita of Brown University where she is on the President’s Diversity Advisory Council and on the Alumni Advisory Board for the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.

Updated August 12, 2024