Jean E. Howard papers (Ms.2016.010)

Biographical / Historical

Born on October 20, 1948, Jean E. Howard is a distinguished scholar, teacher, and administrator at Columbia University and a loyal alumna of Brown University where she dedicated her professional life to the study of early modern literature, the history of drama, and the advancement of diversity within higher education.

Howard received a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1970; a Master of Philosophy from the University of London as a Marshall Fellow in 1972; and a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University as a Danforth Fellow in 1975. Howard began teaching at Syracuse University 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, Huntington, and Newberry Library Fellowships. Howard serves as the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where her teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama, Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism.

Widely recognized as an expert in the study of Shakespeare, Howard's research and writings have provided great insight into the socioeconomic and cultural conditions under which he shaped his representations of class and gender. She has published essays on Shakespeare, Pope, Ford, Heywood, Dekker, Marston, and Jonson, as well as on aspects of contemporary critical theory including new historicism, Marxism, and issues in feminism. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration (1984); Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987); The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); with Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997); Marxist Shakespeares, edited with Scott Shershow (2000); and four generically organized Companions to Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2001). She is a co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (2nd ed. 2007) and General Editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. Another book, 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. She also published, with Crystal Bartolovich, a monograph on Shakespeare and Marx in the Great Shakespeareans series for Continuum Press (2012) and is currently completing a book entitled Staging History that uses Shakespeare's history plays as a starting point for considering Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill's use of history in framing debates about current political issues.

Howard is also a skilled administrator. From 1996 to 1999, Howard directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia; in 1999-2000 she was President of the Shakespeare Association of America; from 2004-2007 she served as Columbia's first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives; and from 2008-2011 she was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Howard is a Trustee Emerita of Brown University as well as she chairs the Brown University President's Diversity Advisory Council and is former chair of the Advisory Board of the Pembroke Center.