Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University where she teaches Renaissance literature and feminist studies. She has published numerous articles on early modern drama as well as on aspects of contemporary critical theory, including new historicism, Marxism, historical formalism, and issues in feminism. Her books include Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stagecraft and Audience Response (1984); Shakespeare Reproduced; The Text in History and Ideology, edited with Marion O'Connor (1987); The Stage and Social 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); four generically organized Companions to Shakespeare, edited with Richard Dutton (2003); and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007), the winner of the 2008 Bernard Hewitt Prize for the year's outstanding book of theater history. In addition, she is one of the four editors of The Norton Shakespeare (2nd ed. 2008) and General Editor of the Bedford Contextual Editions of Shakespeare. Professor Howard has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, Folger Library, Huntington Library, and Newberry Library Fellowships, and has twice been honored with prizes for her work as a teacher and mentor of graduate students. She is currently writing a book about the contemporary feminist dramatist, Caryl Churchill, as well as a study of the stage technologies underpinning early modern tragedy.  In all of her scholarly work Howard is interested in how one archives the ephemeral art of the stage and in the dynamic relationship between present concerns and the recovery/invention of the past through textual and sensory traces.  From 1996 to 1999 Professor Howard directed the Institute for Research on Women and Gender; in 1999-2000 she was President of the Shakespeare Association of America; and from 2004 to 2007 she served as Columbia's first Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives.  She is now serving as the Chair of Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature.