Oral history interview with Martha C. Howell, 2015

Biographical Note

Martha Howell, Miriam Champion Professor of History, specializes in social, economic, legal, and women's history in northern Europe during the late medieval and early modern centuries, concentrating on the Burgundian Netherlands, northern France, and Germany. She received her bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and both her M.A. and PhD. from Columbia. Before joining the Columbia faculty in 1989, she taught at Rutgers University in their Women and Gender program, and from 1989 to 1995 she served as Director of the University's Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Scope and Contents

In the first session of this interview, Howell discusses her years as an undergraduate student at Georgetown University; her time working in Germany as a research assistant, au pair, and translator; and her decision to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University. Howell describes her early involvement in the women's movement, volunteering for Ms.magazine, and joining consciousness-raising groups, before moving into a discussion of her graduate studies. As the first female PhD student in European Women's History at the Columbia history department, Howell describes the limited resources available to her at the time. Howell cites the Annales School as a source of inspiration, and describes her involvement in an informal reading group of the Core Curriculum literature, which became a locus for female graduate students. Howell goes on to discuss her experience teaching at Rutgers, during which time she developed an overtly feminist political stance. Howell describes the support she received from the community within the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women through the birth of her child and advancement of her career. Howell describes her decision to leave Rutgers and join the faculty at Columbia. She discusses her involvement with IRWGS and her changing roles over time. Howell also characterizes the relationship between Barnard's women's studies department and IRWGS. Howell continues with a description of IRWGS's institutional footing, and the subsequent integration of race and sexuality studies. Howell describes the challenges IRWGS faced as it evolved to include race as an integral category of analysis. Howell briefly describes her reforms within the history department during her time as chair of the department. Howell's final session focuses predominantly on the political implications of IRWGS, the rise of interdisciplinarity, and the future of feminism at Columbia. Howell also describes generational responses to 9/11 and the work of Lila Abu-Lughod as arising from similar tensions and political diversity within the Institute. Howell cites the challenges she faced teaching at Columbia, including the political impasses and the limitations of the Core curriculum. Howell then moves on to a larger framing of her work as a feminist historian, addressing history as an empirical discipline through which theory is constructed and gains significance. Howell concludes this interview with a description of her vision for IRWGS moving forward.

Subjects

• Barnard College.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University. Department of History
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Dziedzic, Sarah, interviewer.
• Feminism.
• Feminism and higher education--United States.
• Feminist theory.
• Howell, Martha C.--Interviews.
• Intersectionality (Sociology)
• Interviews.
• Motherhood.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rutgers University. Institute for Research on Women.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015