Alexa Alice Joubin

George Washington University | GW · Department of English

"Race" offers a compelling study of ideas related to race throughout history. Its breadth of coverage, both geographically and temporally, provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards: Intersections of Race and Gender // Race and Social Theory Identity // Ethnicity, and Immigration // Whiten...

Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a philosophical investment in literature's reparative merit, a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled f...

Four themes distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theaters from works in other parts of the world: Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; the reception of South Korean presentations of gender identities in film and touring productions; and multilingual, disability, and racial discou...

Co-authored by Alexa Alice Joubin and Lisa S. Starks, this article examines new theories and praxis of listening for silenced voices and of telling compelling stories that make us human. Elucidation of our Levinas-inspired theories of the Other is followed by a discussion of classroom practices for in-person and remote instruction that foster colla...

Premodern critical race studies, long intertwined with Shakespeare studies, have broadened our understanding of the definitions and discourse of race and racism to include not only phenotype, but also religious and political identity, regional, national, and linguistic difference, and systems of differentiation based upon culture and custom. This...

Gendering and race-making practices share analogous logics as processes through which people shape and contest their embodied experiences. Gender and race are as much nouns (identity categories) as they are verbs (actions and social practices). Gender and race are often intertwined, because racialized imaginaries often delimit gender practices, and...

This chapter outlines new methodologies for the study of global Shakespeare through the notion of heterotopia—a concept, proposed by Michel Foucault, that describes worlds within worlds, or cultural spaces that are transformative because of their contradictory or trans-historical ideologies. Artists and audiences project their beliefs onto Shakespe...

This chapter consists of Alexa Alice Joubin's interview of a scholar and educator who has practiced global Shakespeare around the globe. Katherine Hennessey has had the unique experiences and privilege of teaching Shakespeare in Yemen, Kuwait, China, and elsewhere. She has lived and worked in eight very different countries over the past fifteen yea...

How do we enhance the trustworthiness of generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to foster students’ curiosity to learn about humanities subjects in higher education? This study analyzes what conversational AI tools can realistically accomplish in the humanities higher education context and what the substantive, rather than hyped, challen...

Focusing on the modern period, this book employs a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare onstage and onscreen. Intended for use in the classroom, the book begins with a section on methodologies, with chapters showcasing how to read modernist adaptations, global cinema, multilingual productions, and Shakespeare in translat...

How do we analyze diverse and polyphonic performances of Shakespeare around the world with an eye towards equity and social justice? This introductory chapter outlines new methodologies for the study of global Shakespeare through the notion of heterotopia—a concept, proposed by Michel Foucault, that describes worlds within worlds, or cultural space...

This chapter consists of Alexa Alice Joubin's interview of a scholar and educator who has practiced global Shakespeare around the globe. Katherine Hennessey has had the unique experiences and privilege of teaching Shakespeare in Yemen, Kuwait, China, and elsewhere. She has lived and worked in eight very different countries over the past fifteen yea...

In this book review of Shakespeare and East Asia, Shakespeare Bulletin regards the monograph as "a comprehensive and enlightening work. Equally important, it also serves as an inspiration for future studies on global Shakespeares and their receptions.” Joubin reexamines Shakespearean adaptations in East Asia from a less politically focused perspect...

Artificial intelligence is a feminist issue, and technologies often have colonial implications. In fact, technologies as disruptive agents are inherently queer. This course examines the long history of technologies leading up to the public release of ChatGPT. We will chart the Western societies’ apprehension of and faith in, as the case may be, tec...

This book delves into two seeming paradoxes in popular and performance cultures: the proliferation of references to Othello and the peculiar erasure of Blackness in adaptations. This occurred between 2008 and 2016, which coincided with Barack Obama’s presidency. As much as the book critiques the hypocrisy of the Shakespeare industry, it also encour...

Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare, edited and translated by Alexa Alice Joubin, is a groundbreaking collection that sheds a new light on the complex connections and interactions between Shakespearean tragedy and Sinophone culture. The book offers English translations of seven Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese scripts for theatrical adaptations of H...

Where do diasporic subjects belong? How do they create a sense of belonging? Chinese diasporic stories, such as Ha Jin’s 哈金A Free Life, are sometimes misunderstood as espousing binary (assimilationist or separatist) attitudes toward cultural differences. In Transpacific Cartographies, Melody Yunzi Li uses spatial literary theories to shed a new lig...

黄诗芸的研究深得北美学术传统之三昧，强调理论思辨，注重批判意识，自由穿越学科边界。而传统莎学对其的影响也十分显著，重点体现在对文本（演出）的细微把握，以及对多义性的灵活运用上。此外，该书也展现了作者独特的写作风格，包括引人入胜的叙事、优美的文辞和开阔的视野。这些特点不言而喻，读者自然能够感受到。 ISBN: 978-7-308-24401-5

Performativity—how language and nonverbal communication tacitly or overtly affects social actions—is the core of all utterances and imaginative literature. Building on J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Judith Butler has developed, since the 1990s, a theory of gender performativity. It has been widely appropriated as a critical tool to understand se...

The fields of critical disability studies and global Shakespeare have a great deal to say to each other, which is why we are creating this opportunity for an interdisciplinary dialogue and reflection. This year’s Shakespearean International Yearbook focuses on the theme of global disability performances of Shakespeare. Curated by Katherine Schaap W...

Whom does the screen interface serve, and how do artificial intelligence (AI) tools affect theatrical publics across both the playing space and the playgoing space? Screens are a site where cultural and performative meanings are generated and negotiated. This article draws on interface theories to analyze the roles of screens in regulating publics'...

Modernity, as most students of literature may anticipate, is strongly associated with urban culture. The field of modern Chinese studies has indeed experienced an urban turn in its increased attention to urban and modern sensibilities, as evidenced by the outpouring of studies on such Shanghai writers as Eileen Chang. When rural China does come int...

Drawing on her forthcoming book, Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare, Alexa Alice Joubin examines cultural encounters with Shakespeare’s plays as heterotopia, a series of parallel cultural spaces. In particular, theatre and film are key players in creating embodied snippets of knowable worlds, as adaptations open up national...

What are the patterns in Hollywood representations of East Asian American women from romantic comedy to science fiction films? How do racism and sexism intersect in these patterns? Depictions of East Asian women which are full of positive and negative stereotypes. These images are often framed by metaphors of kinship. Imaginations of kinship on scr...

Roderick Hugh McKeown writes that the book “is an ambitious collection, with at least three interwoven critical projects. Her choice to curate a specifically regional approach to the topic is intended to break down the silos created by narrowly defined national Shakespeares” and also to dislodge the conception of China as a homeland in a settler co...

This is a CBC Radio podcast on gender roles in Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Taming of the Shrew, recorded live at Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada. “Liberate your mind, said English professor Alexa Alice Joubin, urging us to embrace the Bard’s open-endedness to ambiguity in his plays. This episode of CBC Radio’s Ideas series was air...

Roderick Hugh McKeown writes that “An allusion may be isolated and fleeting, or part of a sustained engagement with a hypotext; “international” might refer to post-colonial India, settler-colonial Australia, European countries, or their former colonies; the screens involved may range from the early silent films of the twentieth century to computer...

Alexa Alice Joubin and Peter S. Donaldson have developed an online course with a full performance video, introductory materials, and a range of assignments based on Wu Hsing-Kuo’s 2001 adaptation Lear Is Here. With remarkable efficiency, the module provides enough essential context about Wu and the theatrical traditions on which he draws. :: 10.432...

Alexa Alice Joubin, a professor of English at George Washington University, said: “We have so much fun with this material because it’s part of our heritage. Shakespeare didn’t invent English but he did coin a lot of unique expressions. His genius was bringing words together that previously didn’t go together, like ‘green-eyed jealousy.’ A lot of pe...

This is Melody Li's review of Alexa Alice Joubin's Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare. “The anthology remedies a problem in both Sinophone studies and Shakespeare scholarship: the scarce availability of primary research materials on East Asian adaptations of Western classics. One of the main contributions of the anthology is its use of the concep...

Alexa Alice Joubin, Lakeisha R. Harrison (assistant dean for student services, diversity, equity and inclusion), Fatiah Touray (NYU Abu Dhabi), and Shehzad Charania (Government Communications Headquarters UK) had a conversation about how the language of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion may differ across the globe. Our shared aim of finding language...

Transgender theory can counter cisgender sexism when we study historical texts and modern cinematic imaginations of those texts. Cross-dressing is a misnomer, because it overemphasizes sartorial camouflage and compartmentalizes gender expressions. In this presentation, Alexa Alice Joubin outlines her theory of trans lens and offers analyses of Stag...

Educational podcasts have gained momentum in recent years. Closure of live performance venues and widespread lockdowns as part of public hygiene measures during the global COVID-19 pandemic further increased interest in at-home consumption of digitally delivered content for entertainment and education. Supported by the Globe Theatre’s education dep...

When encountering the acronym, TSA, most Americans would associate it with unpleasant airport experiences courtesy of theTransportation Security Administration. However, the TaiwanShakespeare Association offers much for us to celebrate and rejoice at across the oceans. ::: As the vanguard of innovative research, the TSA has enabled new knowledge cr...

Educational podcasts have gained momentum in recent years. Closure of live performance venues and widespread lockdowns as part of public hygiene measures during the global COVID-19 pandemic further increased interest in at-home consumption of digitally delivered content for entertainment and education. Supported by the Globe Theatre’s education dep...

What a piece of theatre work is AI ! Since AI outputs can be seen as a theatrical performance, in her 10-minute paper at the MLA, Alexa Alice Joubin argued that we can teach critical questioning skills using generative AI. She demonstrated responsible and creative ways to teach students meta-cognition, using Shakespeare and early modern studies as...

This volume focuses on Pericles, Prince of Tyre, whose narrative of refugee suffering, familial loss, emotional distancing, people-trafficking, and eventual, joyous recovery speaks strikingly to our historical moment. The play’s internationalist reach, its images of cross-cultural relations, and its Eastern Mediterranean setting also promote a refl...

Inclusiveness in higher education is distinct from advocacy journalism, which means we have to work actively against any ineffectual default to rituals of inclusion. When implemented unilaterally as a one-size-fits-all social imposition, some gestures of inclusion risk becoming empty rituals. As multifocal, multilingual, and multicultural viewpoin...

“The title of this superlative recent volume of essays, edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Victoria Bladen, boldly announces its focus on a topic that could be seen as trivial: mere allusions to Shakespeare and his works in screen texts. The films and shows covered therein are not screen adaptations of Shakespeare, which are the subject of a great ma...

“Joubin makes a case for aesthetic merit to be acknowledged and enjoyed; for multiplicity and play in cultural borrowing to be discerned. Shakespeare thus becomes a mechanism for recognising the global in Asia, and for representing Asias across the globe.” ::: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1418255

In 2023, we welcomed a new university president, unveiled an inspirational new moniker, and were invited to join the Association of American Universities (AAU), the most prestigious group of research universities in North America. In 2023, a number of GW faculty were recognized as exceptional scholars. Alexa Alice Joubin was the inaugural recipient...

Going against the grain, this collection counters the common perception of the Maoist era as a time of ideological conformity. The contributors persuasively demonstrate that theatre activities were varied and lively between the 1950s and 1970s. While there was state control over the arts, performances in urban spaces were more frequently censored t...

In this review, Alexa Alice Joubin outlines the main argument of Xiaomei Chen's Performing the Socialist State: Modern Chinese Theater and Film Culture. "The eight chronologically- and thematically-organized chapters in this book provide a much-needed critical survey of spoken drama (huaju 话剧) from its inception through the Republican and Maoist er...

Alexa Alice Joubin, a professor of English and a Columbian College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Administrative Fellow working on a project about AI in higher education, said she helps faculty struggling to identify cheating with AI tools by developing assignments that aren’t compatible with the technology and sharing ways to use the technology positi...

Alexa Alice Joubin's Shakespeare and East Asia is “a sweeping and formidably learned survey of the many ways in which artists across a vast part of the non-English-speaking world have been reimagining and repurposing Shakespeare’s plays from the 1950s through the present day. It’s a dense, informative, and occasionally dizzying tour d’horizon of mo...

What happens when AI goes to theatre with human audiences? In theatre, digital screen as interface has evolved from a vehicle for dramatic messages to a meaning-making agent with an anthropomorphic presence. Generative AI's natural-language conversational interface has frequently been cast as an anthropomorphic interface. While the tendency to anth...

Shakespeare's sonnet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” may appear an unusual choice for a revolutionary chant, but it was used by Chinese protestors. When they recited those lines of poetry, they partook, unknowingly or not, in a longstanding national tradition of using Shakespeare as a symbol of political resistance in China and elsewhe...

There are certainly non-binary actors on stage, but are there Shakespearean characters who can be read as trans? The answer is yes. To ask whether there are transgender characters is to ask questions about the performance of gender roles. We are also asking questions about the articulation of gender in early modern and modern times. Genderplay is t...

Inclusiveness in higher education is distinct from advocacy journalism, which means we have to work actively against any ineffectual default to rituals of inclusion. When implemented unilaterally as a one-size-fits-all social imposition, some gestures of inclusion risk becoming empty rituals. As multifocal, multilingual, and multicultural viewpoint...

Emma Yu Zhang: “This thought-provoking [and] meticulously researched study maps the richness and complexity of East Asian contributions to the rise of global Shakespeare as a prominent genre and offers a renewed and illuminating understanding of the tension between cultural homogenization and heterogenization in global communities. It unsettles ass...

Contemporary theatre and performance studies are promoting the concept of "radical welcome" or “radical hospitality” in response to past exclusionary practices. People from different communities and backgrounds should be able to participate in theatre without discrimination. Shakespearean performance has the potential to offer a similar welcome to...

To celebrate the inauguration of George Washington University President Granberg, a symposium was held to mark academic excellence. Provost Pamela Norris interviewed Alexa Alice Joubin, Mary Ellsberg, Chet Sherwood, and Ekundayo Shittu to address the significance of interdisciplinary research, risk taking, and what excellence means in different fie...

How do gendered encodings inform Banquo’s and Macbeth’s loaded questions to the witches: “You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so” (1.3.40-41) and “what are you” (43) as well as the crux of being “of woman born”? Why does Cesario tell Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night that he is ‘all the daughters of [his] fathe...

Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, simulate human writing and complicate the inquiry-driven culture we live in. These tools use singular first-person pronouns in their textual outputs and are often associated with anthropomorphic qualities. Within the humanities, conversations tend to focus on detecting new forms of plagiarism. What is missing...

Whether we are looking at the arts pages or the headlines, there is no better time than now to talk about Shakespeare. In this special panel, Marjorie Garber will moderate a discussion between Alexa Alice Joubin, Carla Della Gatta, and Drew Lichtenberg. How can Shakespeare’s plays generate empathy and understanding, when speaking across the divide...

Slide Deck for Alexa Alice Joubin's bilingual presentation on AI in higher education as part of the NCCU Sprout Project 政大高教深耕計畫. Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, enrich the inquiry-driven culture we live in. What is missing from the current debate are insights from the humanities. As a synthesis of human-generated datasets, AI is changing pub...

In 1930, English novelist Evelyn Waugh entertained the prospect of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong playing Ophelia. Waugh went on to say that “I cannot see her as Lady Macbeth.” These comments reflect the racialized myths about Asian women as subservient and dainty objects. :::: These myths continue to inform racist misogyny today that has...

Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University) and Rebecca Lemos Otero (Executive Director, Humanities D.C.) co-presented the 38th Washington DC Mayor's Arts Awards: Born Bold, at the historic Lincoln Theatre. ::: YouTube: https://youtu.be/cTqiz5-706w News: https://mayor.dc.gov/release/mayor-bowser-celebrates-and-honors-dcs-creative-community-38...

Alexa Alice Joubin's keynote at the Sixth Conference on Education in Multilingualism and Gender in Argentina examines new trans theories informed by anamorphosis and performativity. She proposes inclusive ways to interpret Shakespeare's plays and Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando through this trans lens which re-calibrates our critical capacity to und...

Queer performance as a genre is both complex and challenging to track, especially in the throes of political oppression. Why should people who do not identify as queer care about queer performance? Trans-identified dancer Jin Xing has this to say: "As long as we live together in a society, people can always find excuses to discriminate against each...

Alexa Alice Joubin, co-director of the Digital Humanities Institute, said she started using AI tools in her classroom in 2021 to help students with their writing assignments and design research questions. She said regenerative AI — which responds to changing situations — is often subject to “hype” in the media and academics that makes it seem capab...

Outputs by AI (such as ChatGPT) are a form of theatrical performance. Alexa Alice Joubin (co-founder of the Digital Humanities Institute at George Washington University) brings performance studies theories to the study of AI. It is crucial to recognize and unpack how generative AI tools are changing the publics’ relationship to themselves. Professo...

This book traces “waves of migration” of people and of Shakespeare’s texts Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Covering a larger swath of continental Europe, case studies in Migrating Shakespeare cohere around the idea of cultural assimilation and map the influence of trade and travel on textual migrations. Positivist and antithetic...

Agreat deal of analysis goes into a play before the acting begins. In this exclusive seminar, Professor Alexa Alice Joubin from George Washington University and Professor Jyotsna Singh from Michigan State University will explore dramatic theory to dramaturgy and how the vital aspects of Shakespeare’s texts are brought to life through a play’s produ...

Alexa Alice Joubin on Shakespearean Dramaturgy at Canada's Stratford Festival as part of the CBC Ideas Week, the Meighen Forum, and the new Forum Academy Series. • contrasts eighteenth-century and twenty-first-century notions of dramaturgy ::: • explains the critical concepts of speech acts and performativity which is the core of dramaturgy :::...

Good afternoon! We’ve assembled a pair of Shakespeare scholars, a stage director and two actors to discuss the question of the progress in getting Shakespeare from the page to the stage: from the meaning of what’s on the page — what the head understands to the types of meaning we can get in performance — what the heart understands. Featured in thi...

From Hamlet performed in colonial Indonesia in 1619, to the difficulties of translating it into Japanese, which has no obvious equivalent of "to be," Shakespeare’s worldwide transmission in theatre, film, translation, and criticism across four centuries combines imperialism, globalization, and cultural hybridity. Alexa Alice Joubin (author of Shake...

Alexa Alice Joubin’s entry expands the global scope of The Chaucer Encyclopedia (4 vols). This entry, in Volume 3, examines the work by the Chinese translator Lin Shu’s (1852-1924). Lin translated and rewrote several key stories from the Canterbury Tales. Joubin argues that Lin’s works exemplify early twentieth-century Chinese imaginaries of mediev...

Despite its prominence in the dramatic canon, King Lear occupies a peculiar position in stage and screen histories. Throughout the centuries, some Anglophone critics and directors have repeatedly declared the play unstageable due to its cruel and nihilistic vision. However, the tragedy holds an important place in non-Anglophone cinema and theater w...

King Lear has an unusual performance history. It was significantly revised, by Shakespeare or others, between its first two publications and was then succeeded by an adaptation that softened the ending so that Lear and Cordelia survived. In our own times it is performed around the world in productions that explore its relevance to contemporary poli...

The circulation of diverse forms of Shakespearean criticism may not be immediately obvious due to the diffuse nature of disseminating ideas on varied but connected cultural terrains. There are no singular, unitary centers and peripheries in the international circulation of Shakespeare criticism. Therefore, encountering intercultural Shakespeare cr...

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are leaving educators anxious about the relevance of assignment submissions. But alarmism about technology will eventually disconnect teachers from the student generation. There is a third route, the proactive mode: think of innovative ways in which AI can be used to enrich and strengthen student skills. Winner of...

Criticism of the Shakespearean canon through adaptation as a genre has the capacity for liberation and social reparation. As a cluster of complex texts that sustains both past practices and contemporary interpretive conventions, Shakespeare provides fertile ground for training students to listen intently and compassionately to other individuals’ vo...

The chapters in this book constitute a timely response to an important moment for early modern cultural studies: the academy has been called to attend to questions of social justice. It requires a revision of the critical lexicon to be able to probe the relationship between Shakespeare studies and the intractable forms of social injustice that infu...

In this webinar, Fulbright Alumni Ambassador Alexa Alice Joubin (Professor of English at George Washington University) shares her insights on inclusive pedagogy, digital humanities, and incorporating generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in higher education classrooms. Her pedagogical principle has always been to teach with, rather than against, tech...

Shakespeare is a local force to be reckoned with in the global marketplace and in digital and analog archives of collective memory. With the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth in 2014 and quatercentenary in 2016, there are several high-profile instances of global Shakespeare being tapped for its market value. The exchange value of Shakespeare...

The English Romantic reception of King Lear is an important part of Shakespeare's afterlife. Emily Sun's book investigates Anglo-American post-Romanticist readings and appropriations of Lear as a seminal text on the relationship between literature and politics, specifically succession as a philosophical and political issue in British Romanticism an...

This interview with King Sammy Silver, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin and Terri Power, explores drag as a stage practice. A London-based actor and YouTube personality, he represents a new generation of trans artists. He has worked with Power on multiple Shakespeare productions at Bath Spa University in the UK and elsewhere, and has been influenced...

This interview with non-binary actor Jess Chanliau, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, explores genderplay onstage. A bilingual actor, Chanliau spoke candidly on their experience of either being tokenized or being cast frequently as cisgender women. Despite being asked disproportionately to perform the emotional labor of speaking on behalf of trans c...

This interview with Terri Power, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, focuses on the representations of trans masculinity in Power’s play Drag King Richard III. For nearly two decades Power has been at the forefront of trans and queer representation in performances of Shakespeare. Weaving a personal story of the 1990s with Shakespeare’s early modern di...

This special issue on contemporary performance proposes “trans” as method and as a social practice rather than as an immutable identity category that stands in opposition to more established ones such as cisgender men or cisgender women. We ask new questions about Shakespearean performance: How might the meanings of the plays change if we consider...

This interview with Dr. Mary Ann Saunders, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, offers a new interpretation of Julie Taymor’s film The Tempest. Bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists’ works, Saunders proposes a new interpretation of Ariel, as performed by Ben Whishaw, as a trans woman who is “both beautiful and bi...

Alexa Alice Joubin, professor of English, was named the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award earlier this month. The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association (PCA / ACA) established the award to commemorate the late feminist writer and activist bell hooks, who has authored more than 30 books. The award recognizes J...

Alexa Alice Joubin received the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, which recognizes Professor Joubin’s “contributions to social justice and inclusive excellence ” that exemplify “the ideals that Dr. King espoused,” particularly “community-based social justice organizing rooted in non-violence.” The MLK Award comes on the heel of her bell hooks...

When: Friday, April 14, 10am to 4:30 pm. In-person event. :::: Where: University Student Center 309 (800 21st St. NW) :::: Generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) tools have the potential to alter profoundly the ways we work, create, think, and behave. They raise such questions as: What makes humans distinctive? Can machines have consciousness? W...

Open Education Resources (OER) for higher education have made significant progress over the last few decades and peer- reviewed textbooks and instructional material are now routinely and successfully used by instructors. Join the Washington Research Library Consortium Textbook Affordability Working Group for a brief introduction to open textbooks a...

Alexa Alice Joubin, author of the open-access Screening Shakespeare, https://screenshakespeare.org/, will share how she created the textbook. Open Education Resources (OER) for higher education have made significant progress over the last few decades. Textbook affordability continues to be a serious concern for our students. The event is hosted by...

When ChatGPT was launched, Alexa Alice Joubin realized it was here to stay. She views it as her responsibility to teach students how to use it responsibly, not as a shortcut. “This technology is going to be with us, and students need employable skills in terms of curation, editorial repackaging and prompt engineering,” Joubin said. “They need to be...

Alexa Alice Joubin was named the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award on April 7, 2023. The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association (PCA / ACA) established the award to commemorate the late feminist writer and activist bell hooks (1952-2021) who has authored more than 30 books. The award recognizes Joubin’s achiev...

Alexa Alice Joubin was named the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award on April 7, 2023. The Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association (PCA / ACA) established the award to commemorate the late feminist writer and activist bell hooks (1952-2021) who has authored more than 30 books. The award recognizes Joubin’s achie...

All the world’s a stage, but the irony is the rest of the globe often has an easier time understanding William Shakespeare than English speakers. “English audiences are at a disadvantage because the language has evolved and is more and more distant. They need footnotes, props and staging to understand,” said Alexa Alice Joubin, a Shakespeare schola...

This special issue on contemporary performance proposes "trans" as method and as a social practice rather than as an immutable identity category that stands in opposition to more established ones such as cis-gender men or cisgender women. We ask new questions about Shakespearean performance: How might the meanings of the plays change if we consider...

Cross-gender roles and performances permeate many of Shakespeare’s plays. This special issue on contemporary transgender performance of Shakespeare was published by the open-access journal dedicated to Shakespeare and appropriation, Borrowers and Lenders, and edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. She shows that these cross-gender acts have been misundersto...

Gender is a set of interpersonal relationships and social practices that evolve in the presence of other people , in social spaces, and over time. My theory of trans lens corrects the institutionalized cis-sexism that assumes the cis status of even those characters with fluid gender practices. It does so by questioning the purported neutrality of c...

This interview with non-binary actor Jess Chanliau, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, explores genderplay onstage. A bilingual actor, Chanliau has played Viola, "an intrinsically trans character" in Twelfth Night and a queer Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. They spoke candidly on their experience of either being toke-nized or being cast frequently as c...

This interview with King Sammy Silver, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin and Terri Power, explores drag as a stage practice. A London-based actor and YouTube personality, he represents a new generation of trans artists. He has worked with Power on multiple Shakespeare productions at Bath Spa University in the UK and elsewhere, and has been influenced...

This interview with Terri Power, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, focuses on the representations of trans masculinity in Power's play Drag King Richard III. For nearly two decades Power has been at the forefront of trans and queer representation in performances of Shakespeare. Weaving a personal story of the 1990s with Shakespeare’s early modern di...

Cultural appropriation can be an exploitative act but need not be; it all depends on what users do with Shakespeare. Due to the unequal status of the parties engaged in appropriative exchange, some appropriations deploy Shakespeare to protect conventional power structures. Appropriations are rarely negotiated on a level playing field, especially wh...

This interview with Dr. Mary Ann Saunders, conducted by Alexa Alice Joubin, offers a new interpretation of Julie Taymor's 2010 film The Tempest. Bringing her life experience to bear on cisgender biases in non-trans artists' works, Saunders proposes a new interpretation of Ariel, as performed by Ben Whishaw, as a trans woman who is "both beautiful a...

Participants in this interactive session will learn ways to talk about disability and transgender life with sensitivity and respect, why "visibility" is not always empowering or desirable for trans individuals and for people with disability. We will learn about the key issues with today’s vocabulary about disability and transgender practices. Throu...