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 article argues that there exists a problematic nexus between the industrial livestock industry, US food system policies, and American propagandist literature. The essay’s specific aim is to transform carnivorous appetites by subverting the integrity of America’s national gastronomic emblem – the hamburger. The article examines how hambu…[Read more]

This article examines how the South African film Bustin’ Bonaparte (2004) presents a
post-apartheid adaptation of Victorian colonialism in Olive Schreiner’s 1883 English novel The Story
of an African Farm. While both narratives utilize the surprising mode of play to unfold competing
racial and gender hierarchies in colonial Africa, Lis…[Read more]

A STEAM-informed humanities’ essay describing the theoretical concept of “ecophobia”-a notion put forward in Simon Estok’s theoretical text The Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge 2018) that describes the systemic human fear of nature.

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways
in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence
ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also
reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article
traces the…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature? I claim that conceptually linking the Constitutional protections enabled by the American civil rights movement to an emerging civil rights of nature would enable the rapid transition away from ecophobic attitudes toward…[Read more]

Call for Participation.
The Faculty of Arts, University of Calabar, Calabar Nigeria in conjunction with African Electronic Literature Alliance & African Diasporic Electronic Alliance (AELA&ADELI) organises The 3rd African Electronic Literature Alliance International Workshop Conference (AELAIWC2023)

Theme: Digital Humanities &…[Read more]

In 2023, a new museum opened in Tbilisi, at the Writer’s House of Georgia that previously house the Soviet Writers’ Union: The Museum of Repressed Writers. The museum honours the executed poets from Georgia’s Soviet past, poets whose identities Soviet authorities tried to destroy. This article examines the story the museum tells about Soviet l…[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]

This is pre-publication preview introduces the major questions, methods, and insights of my book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis & the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).

In this short article I argue that the UK government’s decision not to update the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) is more than a missed opportunity. It weaponises the GRA, now an effective instrument of assimilation and containment. The failure to reform the GRA seems like a maintenance of the status quo, but given that the circumstances have s…[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]

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’ v…[Read more]

Stage and screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays raise ethical questions – that is, questions about how human beings should act and treat one another. In which contexts might cross-cultural enterprises be naturalising the values associated with Shakespeare to exploit unequal power relations among artists of different backgrounds? Con…[Read more]

Salacious rumors about Alfred Tennyson’s conduct with young women inspired Virginia Woolf’s satirical depiction of Tennyson and Ellen Terry in her draft and produced play -Freshwater.- In considering whether Woolf’s satire silences the whispers of Victorian women and/or corrects salacious rumor-mongering, this essay decides that the play more…[Read more]

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 schol…[Read more]

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…[Read more]