The annual Asian Theatre Journal Lecture (co-hosted by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and Association for Asian Performance) offers a unique opportunity to hear from one of the leading scholars in the field. This year we are excited to welcome Alexa Alice Joubin. Sign up here.

Is the scholarly “home turf” overrated? For all my life, I have been looking for a place to call home. As an immigrant who engages in multidisciplinary work across different languages, throughout my life and career, I have received a number of labels, and I have called myself a few names. Depending on the context, I have been seen as an Asianist at the crossroads of performance and film studies, as a Shakespeare scholar who works across time periods and cultures, as someone who is expected to represent minority communities in some form, and as a digital humanities educator who brings critical race and gender studies to bear on each other. Born in Taiwan and now with families on both sides of the Pacific and the Atlantic, I am conscious of my position as an ancillary subject in the diaspora. Now, still looking in from the outside, I embrace my marginalized positions which enable me to have orbital perspectives in a time of hate. In this presentation, I will share how I have evolved as an educator and scholar, how I learned not to turn foreign shores into home turf and lose my edge, and how I passed through and sustained transitory spaces in my writing.