Jean E. Howard

Jean Howard is William B. Ransford Professor and Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia University. Professor 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, Early Modern poetry, modern drama, feminist and Marxist theory, and the history of feminism. 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 co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (1997) and General Editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. Her current book project, entitled Theater of a City: The Spaces of London Comedy 1598-1642, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in fall of 2006. From 1996 to 1999 Professor Howard served as Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and in 1999-2000 served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. In fall of 2004 Professor Howard began a three-year term as Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives at Columbia.