Award citation: “The committee members were especially impressed by Professor Alexa Alice Joubin‘s deployment of Perusall as a powerful tool for guiding and developing students’ practices of reading critically, making observations, posing questions, trying out ideas, and ultimately responding to and building on each others’ and their own writing.”

     “Whereas many of us turned to online tools due to the exigencies of the pandemic, her practice bears none of the hallmarks of emergency or make-do usage. Instead, it forms a foundational base for students’ writing, helping them practice key disciplinary moves in close reading, interpretation, and response, preparing them for the work of the more formal writing assignments,” said the University Writing Program awards committee.

     “The other discrete elements of Alexa Alice Joubin’s courses, too, are exemplary. We were especially taken by the guidance she gives on breaking down the elements of filmic and literary texts, giving students the tools they need not only to analyze film and literature independently, but to see how those analytical tools might be applied cross-field, i.e., how filmic concepts might reveal new things in a piece of literature or vice versa.”

     “This seems especially critical in the field of Shakespeare studies, where texts were designed to inform visual performance in the first place.”