Highlights

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.

World Bank: AI, technology and art

Transing Gender and Race-making Practices

East Asian American Women in Film

Featured

QS Summit on AI and Higher Education

Washington, D.C., June 4, 2024

As a form of social robotics, generative AI is a disruptive as well as assistive technology. Educators need to develop new strategies to prepare a new generation of students for AI Innovation. In her plenary, Alexa Alice Joubin argued that meta-cognition and critical questioning skills are among the most important competency in the era of artificial intelligence. She advocated for humanistic, interdisciplinary education in the era of AI.

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.

Keynote: “Shakespeare in a Changing World,” The Shakespearean Theatre Conference, Stratford Festival and University of Waterloo, Canada

June 15-18, 2022

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.

World Shakespeare Congress in Singapore Roundtable on Gender and Sexuality: The State of the Fields

July 19, 2021

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.

Society for Renaissance Studies Book Launch: Shakespeare and East Asia

Friday, February 5, 2021, 12:00 pm EST

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.

Stratford Festival @ Home: Alexa Alice Joubin on Global Romeo and Juliet

November 2020

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.