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…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

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 d…[Read more]

This chapter explores a tension in postcolonial Indian literature between the monolingual form of the nation and the multilingual tendencies of the linguistic regions through a comparison between the Sahitya Akademi’s (India’s national academy of letters) activities and Tamil putukkavitai (new poetry) writing. By promoting translation and con…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W.…[Read more]

Abstract | The final scene of Elia Suleiman’s film, It Must be Heaven (2019), ends with the actor/director sitting in an Arab bar in the city of Haifa, while the young crowd is dancing to “Arabyon Ana” (2000) by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The Arabic music is a testimony to a Palestinian-Arab culture that resists erasure.

The songs in Sulei…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

Video recording of Alexa Alice Joubin’s plenary is available on YouTube, https://youtu.be/8P5nNv86goQ 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…[Read more]

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 r…[Read more]

The story of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is adapted and revised by James Ijames in his play Fat Ham, which ran from 12 May to 31 July 2022 at The Public Theater, coproduced by the National Black Theatre. Ijames’s play, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for drama, plays with and departs from the plot of Hamlet to explore Black manhood, the fam…[Read more]

This is a revised 2023 version of a course was first taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in fall 2018. It addresses feminism, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, and critical race and ethnic studies in conjunction with translation studies.

In his writing, Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has often argued that an image or a set of images has the capability of condensing a number of attributes into a single picture, producing a misleading representation of what other people and cultures are like. As a result, multiple stories evolve into the one story that is told repeatedly and usually…[Read more]

An Essay about a Commonplace book assignment I wrote and tested in 2012 (published in Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy in 2014) and have since revisited and reflected upon. The essay goes into more detail about aspects of my assignment that I had not discussed in my earlier, and more practical, publication for JITP––more spe…[Read more]

A book’s a book, and numbers are numbers, right? Well, maybe. For the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Counting (in) Early Modern Drama,” I proposed to give myself the task of understanding and then communicating the technological underpinnings of a digital facsimile. One specific question I wanted to address, with the help of…[Read more]

According to Fredson Bowers, writing in Shakespeare Quarterly in 1951, we will never know the printer of that section “until we know everything there is to be learned about seventeenth-century types.” 2 Bowers doubted we could ever list the full set of F4’s printers because F4 was printed anonymously, and the volume left few clues about its…[Read more]

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 hook…[Read more]