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 medie…[Read more]

Three consecutive patriarchs of Esoteric Buddhism were Amoghavajra of India, Huiguo of China, and Kūkai of Japan. This paper foregrounds the usually taken-for-granted but vital historical role of language education and translation in the international spread of religion and culture. There had to be sufficiently educated bilingual or multilingual…[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]

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]

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 a…[Read more]

The partition of British India into two sovereign independent nations of India and Pakistan in 1947 was one of the most defining moments of the socio-political course of the sub-continent. The fight for independence from colonial rule and the rise of nationalism rooted in the religious discourse of two prominent religious communities- Hindus and…[Read more]

Text of a talk delivered remotely to Seshadripuram Evening Degree College to commemorate their Golden Jubilee in July 2022. Not peer-reviewed. Discusses, in memoiristic fashion, Tripthi Pillai’s coinage “Shakespeare Damage” — the initial encounter of many minoritized or colonized subjects (including LGBTQ+ persons) with Shakespeare– and…[Read more]

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed, to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life 351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu­tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of…[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 developme…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

The depiction of women of East Asian descent in science fiction films reveals how racial hierarchies are mapped onto, and used as justification for, mistreatment of women—and misogynistic prejudices inform racism. Contributing to the patterns that dehumanize Asian women are multiple sci-fi films that feature cyborgs and androids in Asian female b…[Read more]

This article explores the tradition of Bacha Posh in Afghan culture as depicted in Afghan-American Nadia Hashimiʼs debut novel The Pearl that Broke its Shell (2014). In this novel, Hashimi shows how Afghan girls are obliged to cross-dress and live dual lives as boys for several years to lay claim for their rights to education and freedom of…[Read more]