Jean E. Howard (Ph.D., Yale) is the George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. A past president of the Shakespeare Association of America, she is the author of numerous books on Renaissance drama, including Shakespeare's Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984), The Stage and Social Struggle (1994), Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories, with Phyllis Rackin (1997), Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (2007), and Marx and Shakespeare with Crystal Bartolovich (2012). She is at work on a book about the English history play from Shakespeare to Caryl Churchill and another on the invention of Renaissance tragedy.