This is the first of a two-part interview with Alexa Alice Joubin on global Shakespeare as a field and on her digital humanities project, MIT Global Shakespeares. 

    Committed to open access as a mode to share knowledge, Alexa shared with us how she co-founded the project: “It has been an honor and pleasure to work with Peter Donaldson. As many of us in the field of Shakespeare studies know, Peter is one of the most visionary, earnest, and collegial scholars, providing friendship and leadership along the way. Our interests in the (then nascent) field of global Shakespeare converge, but we bring complimentary skill sets to the project.” 

     Interestingly, she co-founded Global Shakespeares to end “global Shakespeare” as unproductive shorthand: “The digital global age and its attendant imagery replay the message of a Eurocentric or North American centered world asa universal on an even grander scale, though often without the heroic narrative of conquest. What global Shakespeare might be, in an age in which communication is worldwide, instantaneous, and image-rich, global Shakespeare can be a site of conflict as well as new artistic and research opportunities. Recognized for its artistic creativity and now established as afield of scholarly inquiry, global Shakespeare remains an ostracizing label, categorizing a group of cultural products that can conveniently be cordoned off. Even though Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays undeniably intertwined with the history of many theatrical traditions, global Shakespeare does not quite fit comfortably within any discipline.”