Review of

Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles: Stage Roles of Anglo-American Girls in the Nineteenth Century. By Marlis Schweitzer.
University of Iowa Press, 2020. 276 pp.

The Politics of Gender in Early American Theater: Revolutionary Dramatists and Theatrical Practices. Edited by Leopold Lippert and Ralph J. Poole. Transcript, 2021. 214…[Read more]

This article recovers the life and career of Virginie Gireaudeau, one of the first African American actresses to appear in a major North American theater. Performing in New Orleans in 1826, she played the female lead in two tragedies, supported by a group of white professional actors and actresses from France. But despite Gireaudeau’s obvious s…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

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, c…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

Focusing on the modern period, this book employs a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare onstage and onscreen. Heterotopia and thick description as methodologies help us capture, rather than flatten, cultural spaces and their dynamic interplay. The global is a set of geographical and cultural sites created by artistic…[Read more]

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, t…[Read more]

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 K…[Read more]

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 under…[Read more]

My keynote explores such questions as: 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? Watch the video recording on YouTube (https://youtu.be/iHjKOYf-IXQ) to gain a better understanding how gender biases are…[Read more]

Global Shakespeare as Heterotopia by Alexa Alice Joubin. Lecture video now available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/R8mbUd_mHjQ Drawing on her forthcoming book, Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2024), Alexa Alice Joubin examines cultural encounters with Shakespeare’s plays as heterotopia, a set of parallel s…[Read more]

Full podcast on YouTube https://youtu.be/dNhxFiaoIGM 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…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

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) from its inception through the Republican and Maoist eras…[Read more]