Jean E. Howard, BA, MPhil, PhD

George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

Jean E. Howard began teaching at Syracuse in 1975, where she received the first University-wide Wasserstrom Prize for excellence as teacher and mentor of graduate students; she has also received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, Folger and Newberry Library fellowships. In 2003-04 she was the Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. Her teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism. Prof. Howard is on the editorial board of Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama.

She has published and edited numerous books including: with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997); Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000); The Norton Shakespeare (2nd Ed. 2007); and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007) for which she was awarded the Barnard Hewitt Prize by the American Society for Theater Research for the outstanding book of theater history for the year 2008. She is currently working on a book on the feminist dramatist Caryl Churchill, and a study of the development of Renaissance Tragedy. From 1996 to 1999 Professor Howard directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and in 1999-2000 she was as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. From 2004 to 2007, Professor Howard served as Columbia’s first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives.

While Howard was a member of the Board of Trustees of Brown University, she chaired its trustee Committee on the Status of Women, which undertook a major study of the impact on students and faculty of the decision to merge Pembroke and Brown into a fully coeducational institution. She is also a member of Brown’s presidential Advisory Council on Diversity.

Howard has a B.A. from Brown University (1970), an M.Phil. from the University of London (Marshall Fellow 1972), and a Ph.D. from Yale University (Danforth Fellow 1975).