Research

Highlights

Areas of Expertise

Trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI); feminist, transgender, queer, and critical race theory; Shakespeare; film and performance studies; digital humanities; disability studies; globalization; cultural diplomacy; Asian-European cultural exchange; early modern (Renaissance) and postmodern cultures; translation theories; intercultural theatre; Asian-American, East Asian and Sinophone (including Taiwanese) theatre and film

Video Highlights

bell hooks Lecture: Trans* Studies and Critical Race Theory at the Crossroad in Pop Culture

Featured

Joubin is currently a Public Interest Technology Scholar working on generative AI and open education resources (OER) as public interest technologies. She is a faculty in George Washington University’s Trustworthy AI Initiative, TAI (her Digital Humanities Institute is also a partner program of TAI). She is also a faculty affiliate at the National Science Foundation’s Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS).

How AI Changes Theatrical Publics

Shakespeare Bulletin 41.4 (Winter 2023): 529-553

When AI goes to theater with humans, it changes the dynamics of the social space. This article examines a case of audiences being asked by organizers to use an AI app on their phones to translate a sign language performance. This study draws on interface theories to analyze the roles of screens in regulating publics’ access to performance, producing new ambient conditions of theatergoing and changing the publics’ relationships to themselves and to performance. AI s creens in All the World’s a Screen, an Irish Sign Language production, served and became co-spectating theatrical publics. Operating both within and beyond the fabula of the performance, screens as anthropomorphic interfaces create multiple theatrical publics through an imperfect spectatorial proxy.

DOI Full Text Journal Website

Shakespeare and East Asia

Oxford University Press, 2021 Four themes distinguish post-1950s East Asian cinemas and theaters from works in other parts of the world: Japanese innovations in sound and spectacle; Sinophone uses of Shakespeare for social reparation; the reception of South Korean presentations of gender identities in film and touring productions; and multilingual, disability, and racial discourses in cinema and diasporic theatre in Asian America, Singapore, and the UK. How do actors reposition their racialized bodies on stage and on screen? How did Akira Kurosawa influence George Lucas’ Star Wars ? How do East Asian cinema and theatre portray vocal disability? How do Korean transgender cinema and 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.

SAMPLE CHAPTER BUY

Performativity and Trans Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature , ed. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp (2024), 29-39

Performativity—how language tacitly or overtly affects social actions—is the core of all utterances and imaginative literature. This chapter examines transness in what might be called body-swap narratives, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Sally Potter’s film adaptation of it, Makoto Shinkai’s film Your Name , the Wachowski Sisters’ Matrix trilogy, as well as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s and Andy Fickman’s film versions of the comedy. Joubin’s theory of performativity hinges on the ideas that gender are social practices and interpersonal relationships that evolve over time and in different social spaces and that these practices are constituted, and sometimes undermined, by performative speech acts. Performativity destabilizes the idea of singularity and the perceived absolutism of such signifiers as gender.

DOI FULL TEXT

Trans Studies at the Crossroad: From Racialized Invisibility to Gendered Legibility

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race , ed. Patricia Akhimie (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 195-211. This chapter argues that race and gender are social practices that evolve over time, in each other’s presence, and in different social spaces. Bringing critical race theory and trans studies together, this chapter examines racial and gendered otherness through case studies of performances of Shakespeare’s plays. To correct the early modern studies’ tendency to privilege narrative texts, this chapter uses global and performance studies methods—as critical tools that are designed to capture transformative cultural practices—to highlight embodied significations of transness. The chapter concludes with a reflection on pedagogical implications of multidisciplinarity. Providing critical tools to understand atypical bodies, trans studies solidifies critical race studies’ support of minority life experiences.

FULL TEXT Oxford website

Screening Social Justice: Performing Reparative Shakespeare against Vocal Disability

Adaptation 14.2 (August 2021): 187–205; DOI: 10.1093/adaptation/apaa031 Many screen and stage adaptations of the classics are informed by a preconceived notion that performing the canon can make one a better person. Inspirational narratives, in particular, have instrumentalized the canon to serve socially reparative purposes. Social recuperation of disabled figures loom large in adaptation, and many reparative adaptations tap into a curative quality of Shakespearean texts. Governing the disability narrative is the trope about Shakespeare’s therapeutic value. There are two strands of recuperative adaptations. The first is informed by the assumption that the dramatic situations exemplify moral universals. The second strand consists of adaptations that problematize heteronormativity and psychological universals in liberal humanist visions of the canon. This article identifies a common trope in reparative performances of disability in order to highlight some questions the trope raises.

FULL TEXT

Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate

Shakespeare Survey 74 (2021): 15-29 ( open access ) Co-authored by Alexa Alice Joubin and Lisa S. Starks , this article examines new theories and praxis of listening for silenced voices and of telling compelling stories that make us human. We draw on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy about the Other to design classroom practices for in-person and remote instruction that foster collaborative knowledge building and intersectional pedagogy. The moral agency that comes with the cultivation of ethical treatment of one another can lead to political advocacy. Special attention is given to race, gender, and the exigencies of social justice and remote learning in the era of the global pandemic. The new normal in higher education, which is emerging at the time of writing, exposes inequities that were previously veiled by on-campus life and resources. Even as they are cause for grief and anxiety, the inequities exposed by COVID-19 can spur change for the better.

FULL TEXT BUY

Trans as Method

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14.2 (2023). Open Access. This article proposes “trans” as method and as a social practice rather than as an immutable identity category that stands in opposition to more established ones such as cis-gender men or cisgender women. In Shakespeare’s times, the enactment of gender practices is not predicated upon “substitutions” (as in substituting the boy actor for Desdemona, for instance) or entail diagnostic recognition (as in being reminded of the “real” body beneath the illusion of Ophelia or Desdemona). This article outlines key issues with today’s terminology, suggests a more effective and inclusive vocabulary, elucidates trans as method, and demonstrates trans studies’ relevance to Shakespeare studies.

Full Text Open-Access Journal

Race by Martin Orkin and Alexa Alice Joubin

Routledge New Critical Idiom Series, 2019 A study of ideas related to race throughout history. This book provides readers with an expansive, global understanding of the term from the classical period onwards: Intersections of Race and Gender Race and Social Theory Identity Ethnicity, and Immigration Legislative and Judicial Markings of Difference South Africa, Israel, East Asia, Asian America Blackness in a Global Context Race in the History of Science Critical Race Theory

SAMPLE CHAPTER BUY

Contemporary Transgender Performance of Shakespeare

Special Issue of Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14.2 (2023), edited by Alexa Alice Joubin Cross-gender roles in Shakespeare have been misunderstood as “cross-dressing.” The enactment of gender practices is not predicated upon “substitutions” (as in substituting the boy actor for Desdemona). It does not entail diagnostic recognition (as in being reminded of the “real” body beneath the illusion of Desdemona). The special issue — proposes “trans” as method and as a social practice argues that the enactment of gender practices is not predicated upon “substitutions” demonstrates trans studies’ relevance to Shakespeare studies highlights artists’ and practitioners’ voices and amplifies marginalized narratives

Introduction Open Access Journal

Enhancing the Trustworthiness of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Responsive Pedagogy in the Context of Humanities Higher Education

General Aspects of Applying Generative AI in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges , (Springer Nature, 2024), pp. 207–220 To test the hypothesis of trustworthy AI and to model best practices in education, this discusses a proof-of-concept proprietary AI Teaching Assistant designed by Professor Joubin . The project analyzes what conversational AI tools can realistically accomplish in the humanities higher education context. The study finds two substantive challenges posed by AI: singularity and mistaking synthesis for critical thinking. Joubin offers a solution to each challenge. The project also argues that AI is a ghost and synthetic version of the publics. AI throttles and controls the general public’s access to information.

FULL TEXT BUY

Books (Selected)

Shakespeare and East Asia

Oxford University Press, 2021

BUY

Race

Co-authored with Martin Orkin. Routledge, 2019

BUY

Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare , ed. Alexa Alice Joubin

Arden Bloomsbury, 2024

BUY

King Lear, ed. Michael Best & Alexa Alice Joubin

Broadview Press, 2023.

BUY

Onscreen Allusions to Shakespeare: International Films, Television, and Theatre

Edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Victoria Bladen. Palgrave , 2022. Illustrated excerpt with film clips.

BUY

Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation

Edited by Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

BUY

Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology, 1987-2007

Edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. Palgrave , 2022

BUY

The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare

General Editor: Alexa Alice Joubin; Co-editor: Natalia Khomenko; Guest Editor: Katherine Schaap Williams. Routledge , 2024

ISBN 9781032649238 DOI

DOI BUY

The Shakespearean International Yearbook 20: Pericles

Co-edited by Tom Bishop, Alexa Alice Joubin, and Deanne Williams. Routledge , 2024

BUY

The Shakespearean International Yearbook 19: Shakespeare and Refugees

Co-edited by Tom Bishop, Alexa Alice Joubin, Ton Hoenselaars, and Stephen O’Neill. Routledge , 2022

BUY

Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance

Co-edited with Aneta Mancewicz. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

BUY

The Shakespearean International Yearbook 18: Soviet Shakespeare

Co-edited with Tom Bishop and Natalia Khomenko. Routledge, 2020

BUY

Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange

Columbia University Press , 2009 Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies

BUY

Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace

Purdue University Press, 2009

Sample

Weltliteratur und Welttheater: Ästhetischer Humanismus in der kulturellen Globalisierung

Transcript Verlag, 2012

: Book Review in English

Sample

Screening Shakespeare

An open-access, multimedia, interactive textbook by Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University

Link

Articles

How AI Changes Theatrical Publics

Shakespeare Bulletin 41.4 (Winter 2023): 529-553

DOI

Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate

Shakespeare Survey 74 (2021): 15-29 ( open access )

Screening Anti-Asian Racism: Gendered and Racialized Discourses in Film and Television

Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 19.1 (March 2022): 167-180. DOI 10.1215/25783491-9645962

Local Habitations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare Bulletin 40.3 (Fall 2022): pp. 417-437. DOI: 10.1353/shb.2022.0037

Trans as Method: The Sociality of Gender and Shakespeare

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14.2 (2023). Open access.

Screening Social Justice: Performing Reparative Shakespeare against Vocal Disability

Adaptation 14.2 (August 2021) : 187–205.

Shakespearean Performance through a Trans Lens

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 14.2 (2023). Open access.

Anti-Asian Racist Misogyny in Science Fiction Films

The American Mosaic: The Asian American Experience (Bloomsbury ABC-CLIO, 2022). Digital Database

“Uncomfortable Bedfellows: Shakespeare and Global Studies”

Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare 40 (2022), doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.7040

“Deconstructing Compulsory Realpolitik in Cultural Studies: An Interview with Alexa Alice Joubin”

The American Journal of Chinese Studies 28.2 (October, 2021): 115-130. Interviewed by David Kenley and William Sewell

Performing Commemoration: The Cultural Politics of Locating Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare

Asian Theatre Journal 36.2 (Fall 2019): 275-280

Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive

Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 38-51.

“What Country, Friends, Is This?”: Touring Shakespeares, Agency, and Efficacy in Theatre Historiography

Theatre Survey 54.1 (2013): 51-85.

“Familiar Ambiguity: The Value of the Humanities in a Globalized World”

Signal House 10, 2021

“Asian Adaptations of Shakespeare Today”

The Theatre Times , 2021

“Adapting Shakespeare: shattering stereotypes of Asian women onstage and onscreen”

Oxford University Press blog , 2021

“Performing Shakespeare in the Era of COVID-19”

The Theatre Times , 2021

“The Roots of Anti-Asian Racism in the U.S.”

George Washington University Department of English Blog , 2021

Asian/American studies

Global Shakespeares in World Markets and Archives: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 11.1 (2017)

Global Shakespeares as Methodology

Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 9.3 (2013): 273-290.

Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: The Dialectics between the Global and the Local in Lao She’s Fiction

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 69.1 (2008): 97-118.

Asian/American studies

The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile

Theater Journal, 63.3 (2011): 365-379.

The Locality of Cultural Identity and Knowledge Production: Observations from Early Modern Studies

Chung Wai Literary Quarterly 43.1 (March 2014): 191-195

DOI: 0.6637/CWLQ.2014.43(1).191-195.

Asian/American studies

Chapters

Performativity and Trans Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature , ed. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp (2024), 29-39

DOI

Enhancing the Trustworthiness of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Responsive Pedagogy in the Context of Humanities Higher Education

General Aspects of Applying Generative AI in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges (Springer Nature, 2024), pp. 207–220

ISBN: 978-3-031-65690-3

DOI

Trans Studies at the Crossroad: From Racialized Invisibility to Gendered Legibility

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race , ed. Patricia Akhimie (Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 195-211.

Performing Reparative Transgender Identities from Stage Beauty to The King and the Clown

Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern , ed. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Klosowska (Cornell University Press, 2021), 322-349

The Great Globe Itself: An introduction to Shakespeare in heterotopia

Contemporary Readings in Global Performances of Shakespeare , ed. Alexa Alice Joubin. Arden Bloomsbury, 2024

“Interfacing Shakespeare Onscreen”

Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Interface (2023), ed. Clifford Werier and Paul Budra, pp. 332-344

DOI

Collaborative Rhizomatic Learning and Global Shakespeares

Reimagining Shakespeare Education: Teaching and Learning through Collaboration , ed. Liam E. Semler, Claire Hansen, and Jacqueline Manuel (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 225-238

DOI

“What makes Global Shakespeares an exercise in ethics?”

Global Shakespeare and Social Justice : Towards a Transformative Encounter, ed. Chris Thurman and Sandra Young (Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 58-77.

“Global mediation: Performing Shakespeare in the age of networked and digital cultures”

The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance , ed. Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince (Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 132-150

Radical Listening and the Global Politics of Inclusiveness

Inclusive Shakespeares: Identity, Pedagogy, Performance , ed. Sonya Freeman Loftis, Mardy Philippian, Justin P. Shaw (Palgrave, 2023), pp. 221-234

ISBN 978-3-031-26521-1 DOI

DOI

Remedial Uses of Shakespeare

Coauthored by Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin as a chapter in Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation , ed. Vanessa I. Corredera, L.Monique Pittman, Geoffrey Way (Routledge, 2023), pp. 222-233

DOI

Can the Biopic Subjects Speak? Disembodied Voices in The King’s Speech and The Theory of Everything

A Companion to the Biopic , ed. Deborah Cartmell and Ashley D. Polasek (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 269-282.

Transgender Theory and Global Shakespeare

Performing Shakespearean Appropriations: Essays in Honor of Christy Desmet , ed. Darlena Ciraulo, Matthew Kozusko, Robert Sawyer (Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2022), 161-176

Adaptation studies and interactive pedagogies

Liberating Shakespeare : Adaptation and Empowerment for Young Adult Audiences, ed. Jennifer Flaherty and Deborah Uman (Bloomsbury, 2023), pp. 187-200

Others within: Ethics in the Age of Global Shakespeare

Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation , ed. Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson (Routledge, 2020), pp. 25-36.

Global Shakespeare Criticism beyond the Nation State

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance , ed. James C. Bulman (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 423-440. Click here to access the digital text . Click here for a scanned facing-page PDF file and here for the easier-to-read PDF of the print edition.

Translingual Shakespeare

Shakespeare in Succession: Translation and Time , ed. Michael Saenger and Sergio Costola (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), 298-307

Afterword: Towards a regional methodology of culture

Disseminating Shakespeare in the Nordic Countries: Shifting Centres and Peripheries in the Nineteenth Century , ed. Nely Keinänen and Per Sivefors (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 291-296.

Shakespeare as a Digital Nomad

Digital Shakespeares from the Global South , ed. Amrita Sen (New York: Palgrave, 2022), pp. 93-104.

Translational Agency in Liang Shiqiu’s Vernacular Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Global Sonnets: Translation, Adaptation, Performance , ed. Jane Kingsley-Smith and W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. (Palgrave, 2023), pp. 161-179

Boomerang Shakespeare: Foreign Shakespeare in Britain

The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare Vol. 2: The World’s Shakespeare, 1660-Present, ed. Bruce Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 1094-1101.

King Lear on the Small Screen and Its Pedagogical Implications

Shakespeare on Screen: King Lear, ed. Victoria Bladen, Sarah Hatchuel, and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

“Global Shakespeares: A Critical Introduction”

Palgrave Encyclopedia of Global Shakespeare , ed. Alexa Alice Joubin, Ema Vyroubalova, and Elizabeth Pentland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)

“Global Studies”

The Arden Research Handbook of Contemporary Shakespeare Criticism , ed. Evelyn Gajowski (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), pp. 247-261

Shakespeare and Translation

The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 68-87. ( Excerpt )

Asian American Theatre Re-imagined: Shogun Macbeth in New York

Weyward Macbeth: Signs of Race, ed. Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (Palgrave, 2009), 182-190.

Mo Yan’s Work and the Politics of Literary Humor

Mo Yan in Context: Nobel Laureate and Global Storyteller, ed. Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang (Purdue University Press, 2014), pp. 153-166.

Encountering Shakespeare’s Plays in the Sinophone World

A New Literary History of Modern China , ed. David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University Press, 2017), 924-930. DOI: 10.4159/9780674978898-159

The Chaucer Encyclopedia

“Lin Shu.” The Chaucer Encyclopedia 4 vols., Vol. 3, ed. Edited by Richard Newhauser (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), pp. 1085-1086. ISBN: 9781119087991 . DOI: 10.1002/9781119086130.ch12

Intercultural Theatre and Shakespeare Productions in Asia

Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre , ed. Siyuan Liu. New York: Routledge, 2016. pp. 504-526

Screening Dutch Formosa in 2000: Taiwan as China’s Renegade Province in Wu Ziniu’s The Sino-Dutch War 1661

Scenes from Dutch Formosa: Staging Taiwan’s Colonial Past, ed. Llyn Scott ( Portland ME: MerwinAsia, 2014), pp. 153-179

ISBN 978-1-937385-28-6

Performance & Book Reviews

Alexa Alice Joubin’s MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, reviewed by Zoltán Márkus

Early Modern Digital Review 4.2 (2021)

Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 44. (2021): 189-192. A review of the MIT Global Shakespeares .

Alexa Alice Joubin’s MIT Global Shakespeares, reviewed by Roderick Hugh McKeown

The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Disability Performance and Global Shakespeare (Routledge, 2024), 199-200

Alexa Alice Joubin’s MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, reviewed by Amrita Sen

Amrita Sen, “ Practicing Digital Shakespeare in Latin America : Case Studies from Argentina and Brazil,” Digital Shakespeares from the Global South , ed. Amrita Sen ( PDF )

: A review of the MIT Global Shakespeares .