Jean E. Howard
Professor Jean Howard’s teaching interests include Shakespeare, Tudor and Stuart drama, Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism.
She was a 2020 recipient of the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Folger Shakespeare Library, The Huntington, and the Newberry Library.
Professor Howard is on the editorial board of the journals Shakespeare Studies and Renaissance Drama. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (2007), winner of the 2008 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History; and four generically organized Companions to Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2001). Howard is a co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (3rd ed. 2015).
From 1996 to 1999 Professor 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 to 2007 she served as Columbia's first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives; and from 2008 to 2011 she was Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Currently, as a Trustee Emerita of Brown University, she is a member of the Brown University Advisory Council on Diversity and serves on the Pembroke Center Advisory Council; she is also a Senator of Phi Beta Kappa.