Professor Thomas Dabbs (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo) interviews Alexa Alice Joubin as part of the Japanese Ministry of Education’s “Speaking of Shakespeare” series. The project, Digital Studies in Early Modern Drama and Digital Outreach, is sponsored by the Kaken C grant of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The Speaking of Shakespeare channel features conversations about Shakespeare and related topics with scholars, educators, actors. digital developers, and early modern archivists. 

     This 90-minute interview touches on such topics as Alexa’s journey from Taiwan to the U.S. as a student and scholar, her interest in cultural globalization and Shakespeare, her books Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Race (2018), her digital humanities project, particularly the MIT Global Shakespeares, her latest research in critical race theory, trans/gender studies, feminism, and how the pandemic of Covid-19 has changed the theatre and film industries. 

Video Segments:

• 0:00:00 Intro
• 0:01:55 Shakespeare and East Asia
• 0:11:30 Alexa’s life, cultural background and Shakespeare
• 0:23:20 Global Shakespeare
• 0:27:30 Alexa’s American experience and racial identity
• 0:28:20 Alexa’s co-authored book on race
• 0:31:40 Racial identity, challenges, American cultural identity
• 0:42:20 Decolonizing Shakespeare
• 0:49:40 The ethics of Shakespearean appropriation
• 0:58:15 Concrete examples of Shakespearean appropriation
• 1:06:38 Shakespeare in translation
• 1:11:35 Shakespeare and Digital Humanities
• 1:31:35 Closing remarks