As an advocacy speaker and a teacher, Alexa Alice Joubin has spoken on diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as on critical race and gender studies on Capitol Hill during a congressional briefing and in such venues as museums in the US and Switzerland, The Washington Post, The Economist, NPR, BBC, CBC, Voice of America, Edinburgh Festival, PEN America World Voices Festival on Gender and Power, Hay Festival (UK), Stratford Festival (Canada), British Embassy in Washington, DC, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust podcast, Foreign Policy, Penta, Folger Shakespeare Library podcast, Fundación Shakespeare Argentina, Royal Shakespeare Company Residency Program, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, DC film festival, Pittsburgh’s Screenshot film festival, and other media outlets in the US, UK, Brazil, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, and elsewhere. 

Learn more on GWU Media Relations‘ website on humanities and arts experts. 

Featured

Plenary: Are There Transgender Characters in Shakespeare?

Blackfriars Conference, American Shakespeare Center, Staunton, Virginia, November 4, 2023 ::: YouTube

There are certainly non-binary actors on stage, but are there Shakespearean characters who can be read as trans? To ask whether there are transgender characters is to ask questions about the performance of gender roles. There are many transgender characters historically, but their presence is not seen or acknowledged. All utterances retain a level of openness, because meanings emerge contextually over time in drama.

Focusing on “Shakespeare in a Changing World” in the wake of the pandemic’s great interruption, this conference will ask how the study and performance of Shakespearean theatre might respond to the rapid and very real changes we are witnessing, while also investigating the relationship of this theatre to the similarly rapid changes of Shakespeare’s time. Alexa Alice Joubin will be giving the plenary lecture. The other two plenary speakers are Antoni Cimolino (Artistic Director, Stratford Festival) and Brian Cummings (University of York). The Shakespearean Theatre Conference is a joint venture of the University of Waterloo and the Stratford Festival, and brings together scholars and practitioners to talk about how performance influences scholarship and vice versa. The Festival has announced a 2022 season that includes Hamlet, Richard III, All’s Well That Ends Well (the last two in the beautiful new Tom Patterson Theatre), and Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, as well as two world premières: Hamlet-911, by Ann-Marie MacDonald, and 1939, by Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan.

Gender expression that does not match prevailing gender norms is a recurring motif in Shakespeare’s plays. Because the Western canon has historically been given various forms of moral authority, Shakespeare has been used by trans-identified performers and feminists as a tool to deconstruct the gender binary and to challenge the institutionalized cis-sexism. Recent studies have shown that trans identities are far from an exclusively recent phenomenon.

    Sign up through the WSC to access the video recording. 

The 2022 National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute is designed to help high school teachers integrate adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays into their curricula, with an emphasis on Hamlet and Othello. Participants will study a variety of adaptations, including films, video games, graphic novels, stage performances, music, and young adult novels. We will emphasize diversity through pedagogical approaches that help students connect key Shakespearean themes (such as race, gender, and power) with their own lived experiences.

Full video.

How did Akira Kurosawa’s films influence Steven Spielberg’s and George Lucas’s works, including the Star Wars? How do actors reposition their racialized bodies on stage and on screen? How do Korean transgender cinema and East Asian feminism transform gender identities in Shakespeare? Bringing film and theatre studies together, this book sheds new light on the two major genres in a comparative context and reveals deep connections among Asian and Anglophone performances.

Full video here.

Alexa Alice Joubin and playwright Kate Hennig discuss literary star-cross’d lovers spanning the globe and different eras, as well as the politics of these romances within their cultures. 

TV, Radio, and Media Interviews

George Washington University, November 2, 2023  :::  YouTube

An excerpt of a longer interview sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, January 2023. ::: YouTube Video 

CBC Canadian Broadcasting Company program recorded at Stratford Festival in Ontario, 2023 

Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Radio France Internationale, October 11, 2022    :::    Reprinted in Quarto (Shakespeare Theatre Association) Spring/Summer 2023, p. 5 [PDF]

The American Journal of Chinese Studies 28.2 (October, 2021): 115-130.

YouTube, November 5, 2021; co-hosted by SCREENSHOT film festival and University of Pittsburgh Asian Studies

The Asian Connection: Newsletter of Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University, Fall 2018

The Shakespeare Standard, May 28, 2014 (by Jeffrey Kahan)

The Shakespeare Standard, March 9, 2013, by Colleen Kennedy

The Shakespeare Standard, February 16, 2013, by Colleen Kennedy

December 10, 2023 :::  YouTube  :::  George Washington University Provost’s Office News

Past

University of Oxford and Georgetown University, February 26, 2024 :::  Video recording on YouTube 

Symposium on Digital Scholarship, Hong Kong Baptist University, October 27, 2023  [Video Recording]

Imaging Across Time: Wenshan International Conference, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, November 18, 2023  :::  YouTube video

Annual Inclusive Excellence Week Conference, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., January 29-February 2, 2024

Aspen Institute, Washington DC, October 25, 2023

English and American Literature Association in Taiwan, 10 August, 2023  [Video Recording]

Argentina Ministry of Heath, Chamber of Deputies, Cultural Studies and Gender Association, and Universidad Nacional de Catamarca, September 27, 2023  :::  A conference in celebration of Shakespeare’s First Folio [news story]

National Chengchi University 國立政治大學, Taiwan, October 11, 2023   ::::   Slide Deck

Dayapuram Arts and Science College for Women, Kerala, India, June 8, 2023 [Video Recording]

Conference on Chinese American Women in History, 1882 Foundation, Washington DC, October 5-7, 2023   :::   YouTube 

January 18, 2023. Learn more on GW Digital Humanities Institute’s webpage. 

September 7, 2022. A TED-style 10-minute presentation at George Washington University

April 9, 2022 in Jacksonville, Florida :::  Alexa Alice Joubin serves as the discussant

George Washington University, October 6, 2022 ::::  Lecture Slides

Stratford Festival, Ontario, Canada, July 23, 2023   :::    YouTube

8th Annual Diversity Summit, George Washington University, March 2, 2023

5th Annual Diversity Summit, George Washington University, November 7, 2019 

Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario, Canada, July 23, 2023

Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, July 20, 2022

 Video recording available. New York University (NYU) in Shanghai, Center for Global Asia, November 11, 2021 at 8:30 pm in Shanghai; 7:30 am in New York; RSVP here

Washington, D.C., 10:15-11:30 am, Friday, January 7, 2022; registration link

April 18, 2022, University of California Santa Barbara

April 18, 2022 ::: University of California Santa Barbara

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