Suzanne B. Goldberg

Suzanne B. Goldberg

Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law

Suzanne Goldberg, one of the country’s foremost experts on gender and sexuality law and a leading advocate for the LGBTQ community, serves as the Herbert and Doris Wechsler Clinical Professor of Law. She also leads the Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law and its Sexuality and Gender Law Clinic.

Goldberg joined the Law School’s full-time faculty in 2006. She previously served on the faculties of Rutgers School of Law­–Newark and Fordham Law School. In private practice, Goldberg served as a senior staff attorney at Lambda Legal, the country’s first legal organization focused on achieving full equality for lesbian and gay people. During her time at Lambda, she served as co-counsel for the defendants in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas.

In 2015, Goldberg was appointed to serve as Columbia University’s first executive vice president for university life. In this role, she works to reinforce and broaden the university’s commitment to respect, inclusion, and ethical leadership among students, faculty, and administrators. Goldberg is a frequent commentator and analyst for news media on sexuality and gender law, and on discrimination law and litigation issues. Her commentary has been featured on 20/20, CNN, and other national television networks, as well as on radio and news outlets around the world.

Goldberg graduated with honors from Brown University, and went on to serve as a Fulbright Fellow at the National University of Singapore. She earned her J.D. at Harvard Law School and later clerked for Justice Marie Garibaldi of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Goldberg is a recipient of the Law School’s Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Stathis Gourgouris

Stathis Gourgouris

Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Stathis Gourgouris is a Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature, Columbia University and former Director of the Comparative Institute for Literature and Society. Professor Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that ultimately come together around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); and Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham 2013). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two other book projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred. He writes regularly in internet media (such as The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books,  Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, The Immanent Frame), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters. 
 
Professor Gourgouris has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, UCLA 1990. He has taught Comparative Literature at Princeton, Yale, UCLA, and the National Technical University in Athens and spent time as Research Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (National Endowment for the Humanities), the International Institute at the University of Michigan, and the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers. He has also served as Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2009-2015); President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009). In 2015 he was honored with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

Working Group Affiliation

Bandung Humanisms, Project Director

Rishi Goyal

Rishi Goyal

Assistant Professor, Department of Emergency Medicine and the Institute of Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Rishi Goyal, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Institute of Comparative Literature at Columbia University where he is the Director of the Medicine, Literature and Society Major.  Dr. Goyal is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at the University of Southern Denmark.

Dr. Goyal received his MD (2001) and his PhD in English and Comparative Literature (2010) from Columbia University. He was Chief Resident in Emergency Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital (2009-10).  Dr. Goyal’s research, writing and teaching focuses on the reciprocal transformations that result when new ideas about health, disease and the body find forms of expression in fiction and memoirs. His most recent work explores the political, aesthetic, and social dimensions of the representation of physical trauma in literature. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning. Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. He is a co-founding editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, and is the recipient of multiple grants and awards including a recent NEH grant.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology, Project Director

Ellen Greenebaum

Ellen Greenebaum

Associate Professor of Clinical Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons

Ellen Greenebaum is a Clinical team member studying people who were children (in utero to 18 years old) at time of Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident April 26, 1986 to determine effect on thyroid and reviewing fine needle aspirates (FNA) of thyroid nodules and their subsequent surgical pathology. She is an Editorial Board Member of Diagnostic Cytopathology and a participant in a mission with CerviCusco & International Cervical Cancer Foundation, non-profit organization dedicated to the early detection, diagnosis, & treatment of pre-cancers of the female genital tract. 

Ron Gregg

Ron Gregg

Senior Lecturer, Film and Media Studies, Columbia University

Ron Gregg is Senior Lecturer in the Discipline in Film and Media Studies at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He writes and teaches courses on queer, experimental, Hollywood, and global cinema. He co-chaired the Yale conferences on “Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968” and “Secrets of the Orient: Costume, Movement, and Duration in the Cinematic Experience of the East” and organized the film series “Six Lesbian Filmmakers/Six Queer Films” bringing six leading filmmakers to Yale University. His most recent writings include “Fashion, Thrift Stores, and the Space of Pleasure in 1960s Queer Underground Film” and “Sanitizing the Beatles for Revolution: Music, Film, and Fashion in 1960s A Hard Day’s Night.” He is presently co-editing a book on “Queer Cinema” for Oxford University Press. Gregg previously served as Director of Film Programming at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center from 2009-2017 and has curated film and video programming for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the University of Chicago Lesbian and Gay Studies Project and Lenfest Center for the Arts in New York City.

Working Group Affiliation

Environmental Justice, Belief Systems, and Aesthetic Experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, Project Director

Farah Griffin

Farah Griffin

William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University

Professor Griffin's major fields of interest are American and African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, in 2006-2007 Professor Griffin was a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Perseus Books, 2013). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).

Working Group Affiliation

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Project Director

Ayten Gündoğdu

Ayten Gündoğdu

Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College

Ayten Gündoğdu's research draws on the resources of modern and contemporary political theory for the purposes of addressing problems related to human rights, migration, citizenship, and sovereignty. She has recently published Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford University Press, 2015; ISA Theory Honorable Mention). The book offers a critical inquiry of human rights by rethinking Arendt’s key concepts and arguments in light of contemporary phenomena such as immigration detention, deportation, refugee encampment, and struggles for regularization. She is currently working on a new project that examines how the concept of “the human person” figures in the human rights discourse, attending to its violent exclusions as well as inventive reappropriations.

Working Group Affiliation

Reframing Gendered Violence

Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam

Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English

Jack Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment. Halberstam is also finishing up a short book titled Trans* for UC Press, forthcoming in 2018.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui, Project Director

Reframing Gendered Violence

Books Edited:

Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters  Duke UP, 1995 

Female Masculinity  Duke UP, 1998

 In A Queer Time and Place  NYU Press, 2005

The Queer Art of Failure  Duke UP, 2011

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal  Beacon Press, 2012

Kim Hall

Kim Hall

Lucyle Hook Chair, Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College

Kim F. Hall joined the Barnard faculty in 2006. Previously, she held the Thomas F.X. Mullarkey Chair of Literature at Fordham University.  She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, and Georgetown University. Professor Hall's research and scholarship have been supported by the Folger Institute, the ACLS, and the Ford Foundation. She has also received an NEH/Newberry Fellowship, and is listed in Who's Who of American Women as well as Who's Who Among African Americans. Professor Hall's first book, Things of Darkness, was named an outstanding academic book by Choice magazine.  She is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled Sweet Taste of Empire, which examines women, labor, and race in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century.

Kim Hall is also an avid quilter whose work has been exhibited in Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York.

Working Group Affiliation

The Digital Black Atlantic

Bernard E. Harcourt

Bernard E. Harcourt

Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Professor of Political Science, and Director, Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, Columbia University

Bernard E. Harcourt joined the Columbia University faculty in July 2014. His scholarship intersects social and political theory, the sociology of punishment, and penal law and procedure. He is the author most recently of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015), which has been recently reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the L.A. Review of Books, The Intercept, Book Forum, The New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement.

He is also the author of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (Harvard University Press 2011) and of Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (with W. J. T. Mitchell and Michael Taussig, University of Chicago Press 2013). He is the editor of Michel Foucault’s 1973 Collège de France lectures, La société punitive (Gallimard 2014), 1972 lectures Théories et institutions pénales (Gallimard 2015), and Surveiller et punir in the new Pléiade edition of the complete works (Gallimard 2015), as well as the co-editor with Fabienne Brion of Michel Foucault's Mal faire, dire vrai (Louvain 2012; in English, University of Chicago Press 2014).

Harcourt earned his bachelor's degree in political theory at Princeton University, his law degree at Harvard Law School, and his Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University. After law school, he clerked for the Hon. Charles S. Haight Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and then worked as an attorney at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing death row inmates. Harcourt continues to represent death row inmates pro bono and has also served on human rights missions in South Africa and Guatemala.

Harcourt served most recently as the Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science at The University of Chicago. He also has taught at Harvard Law School, New York University Law School, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université Paris X–Nanterre, and Université Paul Cézanne Aix-Marseille III, and was previously on the faculty at the University of Arizona. Harcourt is the former chair of the political science department at The University of Chicago. For more information, visit his personal website.

Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman

Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Women's and Gender Studies, Columbia University

Professor Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo. She has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's Fellow. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). She has published essays on photography, film and feminism. She has published several articles on slavery including “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Time of Slavery.”

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive, Project Director

Gender & The Global Slum, Project Director

Christina Heatherton

Christina Heatherton

Assistant Professor of American Studies, Barnard College

Christina Heatherton is an American Studies scholar and historian of anti-racist social movements. She is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University completing her first book, Making Internationalism: The Color Line, the Class Struggle, and the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, forthcoming). With Jordan T. Camp she edited Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso Books, 2016). Her work will appear in the Cambridge History of America in the World, edited by Kristin Lee Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). It also appears in places such as American Quarterly, Interface, Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change, edited by Leela Fernandes (New York University Press, 2018), Futures of Black Radicalism, edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (Verso Books, 2017), and The Rising Tides of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements Across the Pacific, edited by Moon-Ho Jung (University of Washington Press, 2014). Her writing also appears in popular venues such as Funambulist Magazine, The Washington Spectator, and 032 Magazine. With Jordan T. Camp she previously co-edited Freedom Now! Struggles for the Human Right to Housing in LA and Beyond (Freedom Now Books, 2012). She is the editor of Downtown Blues: A Skid Row Reader (Freedom Now Books, 2011). She is the current co-director of several initiatives including: New Directions in American Studies (NDAS); the Oral History and Activism Project; the Working Group on Racial Capitalism, a project of the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD), Columbia University.

Working Group Affiliation

Racial Capitalism, Project Director

Arden Hegele

Arden Hegele

Lecturer in the Discipline of English and Comparative Literature, Medical Humanities Fellow English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Arden Hegele, PhD, specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and the medical and health humanities. She is interested in the intersection of medical knowledge with formalist and historicist literary approaches. Her two forthcoming scholarly books are Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading (Oxford University Press) and Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities, co-edited with Dr. Rishi Goyal (Bloomsbury). Her research in Romanticism has been published in core journals, such as European Romantic Review, Romanticism, The Byron Journal, and Keats-Shelley Journal, and she has also published in Partial Answers, Gender and Education, and Persuasions. Her book reviews are featured in Public Books, Review 19, Studies in Romanticism, Victorian Network, Partial Answers and Avidly. At Columbia, Hegele has taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, in the Medical Humanities major at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She is a co-founding editor (with Dr. Rishi Goyal) of Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Other projects have included the direction of the Explorations in the Medical Humanities Series at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; co-direction of the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference; coordination of the “Increasing Covid-19 Vaccine Confidence” project; and administration of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes Health and Medical Humanities Network, including hosting its Summer Institute at Columbia Global Centers | Paris.

Working Group Affiliation

Motherhood and Technology, Project Director

Anne Higonnet

Anne Higonnet

Professor of Art History, Columbia University

Anne Higonnet teaches and writes about nineteenth century art, childhood, and collecting. A Harvard College B.A, she received her PhD from Yale University in 1988. She has published three books and dozens of articles on topics ranging from Impressionism to contemporary photography. Her many awards include Guggenheim, Getty, and Social Science Research Council fellowships, as well as grants from the Mellon, Howard, and Kress Foundations. She enjoys teaching at every level of the curriculum, and anchors the team-taught Introduction to the History of Art from the Renaissance to the Present.

Jennifer Hirsch

Jennifer Hirsch

Professor of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University

Jennifer Hirsch's principal areas of expertise are gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, U.S.-Mexico migration and migrant health, the comparative anthropology of love, and the applications of anthropological theory and methods to public health research and programs. Her books include A Courtship After Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (University of California Press, 2003), which explores changing ideas and practices of love, sexuality and marriage among Mexicans in the U.S. and in Mexico, and the coauthored The Secret: Love, Marriage and HIV (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), which analyzes the social organization of extramarital sexual practices in Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua-New Guinea and the implications of those practices for married women's HIV risk. She has also published articles in journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Studies in Family Planning, AIDS, and Culture Health and Sexuality. Along with Dr. Claude Ann Mellins, Hirsch currently co-directs the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), which is a study supported by the Office of the President that examines sexual health and sexual assault among Columbia and Barnard undergraduates.

Working Group Affiliation

Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director

Marianne Hirsch

Marianne Hirsch

Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Marianne Hirsch is William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Center for the Study of Sexuality. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. She was born in Romania, and educated at Brown University where she received her BA/MA and Ph.D. degrees.

Hirsch’s work combines feminist theory with memory studies, particularly the transmission of memories of violence across generations.  Her recent books include School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference, co-authored with Leo Spitzer  (University of Washington Press, 2020), and the co-edited volumes Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (Steidl, 2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). Earlier publications include The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012), Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory, co-authored with Leo Spitzer (University of California Press, 2010), Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), and The Familial Gaze (ed.1999). With Leo Spitzer, Hirsch recently curated "School Photos and Their Afterlives,” an exhibit at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

Hirsch is the former editor of PMLA and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the ACLS, the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, the National Humanities Center, and the Bellagio and Bogliasco Foundations.  She is one of the founders of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, and its global initiative “Women Creating Change.”

Along with a group of local scholars, artists and activists, Hirsch is currently co-directing the Zip Code Memory Project, an initiative that seeks to find art and community-based ways to repair the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.

Working Group Affiliations

Engendering the Archive, Project Director

Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director

Women Mobilizing Memory, Project Director

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project, Project Director

Gil Hochberg

Gil Hochberg

Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies, Chair MESAAS, Columbia University

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (2007), on the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures, and Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (2015), on the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her research focuses on the intersections among psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, nationalism, gender and sexuality, with articles on Francophone North African, Palestinian, and Hebrew literature, the modern Levant, gender and nationalism, cultural memory and immigration, memory and gender, Israeli and Palestinian cinema, Mediterraneanism, and trauma and narrative. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of historical knowledge.

Working Group Affiliation

Insurgent Domesticities

Maja Horn

Maja Horn

Associate Professor, Spanish & Latin American Cultures, Barnard College

Maja Horn specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultures with a focus on literature, visual and performance art, and political culture. She is the author of Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (University Press of Florida in 2014) and is currently completing a second monograph on queer Dominican literature, visual and performance art. She has also published on Latin American and Caribbean arts for various Dominican and U.S. art magazines and is currently serves on the editorial committee for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2006, she was a research associate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she developed and taught a performance studies concentration. Maja Horn is affiliated with and teaches regularly for the Africana Studies Program at Barnard College. She also teaches graduate seminars for the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies and is an affiliate of CSER  (The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race) at Columbia University. In 2016-2017 she was a Heyman Center Faculty Fellow at Columbia University.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui

The Digital Black Atlantic

Lauren C. Houghton

Lauren C. Houghton

Assistant Professor of Epidemiology, Columbia University

Lauren C. Houghton, PhD, takes a biosocial and life course approach to breast cancer prevention. Using tools from  biological anthropology and molecular epidemiology, she focuses on hormones as the mechanism that links what happens above the skin with that beneath the skin. Specifically, she examines the steroid metabolome in relation to intermediate outcomes, including pubertal development and the menstrual cycle, and breast cancer risk. She has extensively worked with migrant studies in Bangladesh, the UK and Mongolia to better understand reproductive factors among females moving from low to high risk geographic areas. She has conducted fieldwork with Native Americans in the Southwest US, menopausal women in the UK and school girls in Bangladesh and is currently a co-investigator of The LEGACY Girls Study in New York City. Having a background in anthropology, Dr. Houghton is also interested in developing mixed-methods to be implemented in epidemiological studies to better capture biological and cultural mediators of health disparities.  She is currently exploring how digital menstrual health can be used in the dissemination and implementation of the latest breast cancer science. Ultimately, by understanding how culture is embedded in our biology and designing culturally compelling interventions she aims to improve the translation of preventative medicine to the public. 

Working Group Affiliation

Menstrual Health and Gender Justice

Jean Howard

Jean Howard

Professor of English and Comparative Literature

Jean E. Howard is a former Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference and the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches early modern literature, Shakespeare, feminist studies, and theater history.  Howard has authored over fifty essays; and 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, and Marx and Shakespeare in the Great Shakespeareans series (2012), co-written with Crystal Bartolovich. In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of The Norton Shakespeare, the third edition of which is now in preparation, and general editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare.  She has edited seven collections of essays and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, and Huntington, Folger, and Newberry Library Fellowships.  A past President of the Shakespeare Association of America and an active member of many committees of the Modern Language Association, she currently serves as a Senator for the National Phi Beta Kappa organization and as Chair of its Visiting Scholar Committee. Howard has received several awards for the teaching and mentoring of graduate students and has directed over forty-five doctoral dissertations.   As an administrator, Howard has served as a Trustee of Brown University and is currently Chair of Brown’s Presidential Diversity Advisory Council and Vice Chair of the Pembroke Center’s Associates’ Board. At Columbia she has served as Chair of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, as Columbia’s first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, and as Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature.  She has just completed a contextual edition of As You Like It and is turning the Schoff Lectures, which she delivered at Columbia, into a new book, Staging History, Writing the Nation that considers the work of contemporary playwrights Tony Kushner and Caryl Churchill alongside Shakespeare’s history plays. She is planning a book on early modern tragedy.

Working Group Affiliations

Prison Education and Social Justice, Project Director

Engendering the Archive, Project Director

Reframing Gendered Violence, Project Director

Women Mobilizing Memory, Project Director

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Book Publications

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.

Marxist Shakespeares, Edited with Scott Shershow, Routledge, 2000

Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, Routledge, 1997

Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, Edited with Marion O'Connor, Routledge, 1987 

The Stage and Struggle in Early Modern England, Routledge, 1994

Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response, University of Illinois Press, 1984.