Join playwright Caleen Jennings and scholars Ania Loomba and Alexa Alice Joubin for a discussion of the representation of BIPOC in Shakespeare’s work and productions as well as Shakespeare’s texts in relation to both thespian and scholastic platforms in an honest and open discussion. Read More
The 66th Taormina Film Fest took place in Sicily July 11-19, 2020. The feature film Il Re Muore (The King Dies) directed by Laura Angiulli, founder and company director of Galleria Toledo, was selected for the “Feature Competition” of the festival. Read More
MIT Global Shakespeares co-founder Alexa Alice Joubin will deliver a keynote address on Teaching Global Shakespeares and Non-Linear Thinking through Digital Humanities at the University of Alabama Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies Symposium on “The Future of Teaching Shakespeare,” February 21-22, 2020. Read More
MIT Global Shakespeares founding co-director Alexa Alice Joubin was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the largest newspaper in the U.S. dedicated to covering colleges and universities (founded in 1966 and based in Washington, D.C.). Read More
Alexa Alice Joubin will be giving a TED-style plenary presentation on “Global Change through Shakespeare” during the Fulbright Association’s 42nd Annual Conference and Advocacy Day in Washington, D.C., at 9:15 am on Saturday, October 26
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When history is held hostage by politics, when human rights are violated, story-telling helps restore dignity to what it means to be human. When William Shakespeare’s plays move through different cultures, they reveal unexamined assumptions about human nature and tell surprising stories about globalization.
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The second annual Shakespeare Festival in Turkey took place on April 5-20, 2019 co-chaired by Prof. Dr. Ömer Sekerci and Dr. İlker Özçelik of Suleyman Demirel University. With a total of 26 events over 14 days including six live performances, three recorded performances and a multi-speaker conference, the festival consisted of a wide range of exciting events held in Isparta, İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir. Read More
How does Ophelia become “unbound” through supralinguistic structures of spectacle and music especially in a transgender performance? With case studies of three Hamlet films: Haider (India, 2004), The King and the Clown (South Korea, 2005), and Prince of the Himalayas (Tibet, 2006), this article examines theatrical and cinematic presentations of Ophelia’s double bind as an icon and a victim. Read more in Alexa Alice Joubin’s new article on feminist and transgender performances of Ophelia. Read More
Eating Shakespeare: Cultural Anthropophagy as Global Methodology is a new collection of essays and interviews by leading scholars and researchers offering their perspectives on the meaning of “Global Shakespeare.” It is part of the Arden Shakespeare’s Global Shakespeare Inverted series. Read More
MIT Global Shakespeares co-founder and co-editor Alexa Alice Joubin has published a new book, Race, with postcolonial theorist Martin Orkin. The book is part of Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series. The series emphasizes clarity, lively debate, and original and distinctive studies of important topics by leading scholars. Read More
Shakespeare’s role in England’s global expansion is often categorized as a conduit for Empire. For example, Shakespeare’s texts were performed in English for the entertainment of European traders in Calcutta and Bombay in 1775. However, his texts function in a much more complicated way than these earlier models of transmission from London to the peripheries. Performances of Shakespeare offer a lens through which we can view the movement of peoples and their languages and cultures. Read More
Hay Festival in Wales, UK, is the largest literary festival in the world. On our panel with actor Simon Callow on June 3, 2016, we explored issues of censorship in appropriating and teaching Shakespeare. MIT Global Shakespeares co-founder Alexa Alice Joubin spoke at the Hay Festival. Read More
Do artists have moral responsibilities to speak truth to power? Should art comment on or steer clear of politics? How might politics affect artistic creativity? Where do we draw the line? MIT Global Shakespeares co-founder Alexa Alice Joubin spoke on the topic. Read More
Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. Edited by Aneta Mancewicz and Alexa Alice Joubin. In the Reproducing Shakespeare series (ed. Tom Cartelli and Katherine Rowe). Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 “Contradictory myths are the foundation to many conversations about Shakespeare today. We can better grasp the significance of globalShakespeare by understanding the cultural logic of the production and consumption of these myths—often articulated in the form of journalistic adoration of universal aesthetics.” Full text of the Introduction: researchgate.net/profile/Alexa_Joubin Read More
Dr. Ömer Sekerci and Dr. İlker Özçelik of Suleyman Demirel University organized the “1st Shakespeare Festival” in Turkey and the “2nd International Conference on English Language and Literature” which took place April 20-30, 2018 in Isparta, Turkey. Read More
Cris Busato Smith and Alexa Alice Joubin previewed the new MIT Global Shakespeares website in Los Angeles at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America on Thursday, March 29th. Read More
A seminal publication for the study and staging of Shakespeare in Brazil, William Shakespeare. Teatro Completo, is the new edition of Shakespeare’s complete works translated into Brazilian Portuguese. Published in a three-volume box by Nova Aguilar Publishing House to mark the 400th anniversary of death of the English playwright, this edition contains the translations of thirty-eight plays by Shakespeare, including unpublished translations such as Edward III. (Volume I: Tragedies and Dark Comedies; Volume II: Comedies and Romances; Volume III: History Plays). Read More
The Lancaster Campus of HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, hosted its fourth annual humanities symposium from April 11-13, 2017. The three-day event, titled “Shaking Out Shakespeare,” attracted over 600 students, faculty, and community members, and explored the profound influence of William Shakespeare on the arts, humanities, and sciences. Read More
Throwing a good party takes an inordinate amount of work, and Shakespeare commemorations are no different. I’m sure many of the organizers of the myriad events honoring Shakespeare’s death (and more optimistically, 400 years of afterlife) at some point during 2016 thought, “Why did I get myself into this?” Some of their other guests may too have shared a sense of the irony—dare we say overkill?—in making a bigger deal of the death than the 450th birthdate two years prior. Read More
Excerpt: When the first Critical Survey special issue on Arab Shakespeares (CS 19:3, Winter 2007) came out nearly a decade ago, the topic was a curiosity. There existed no up-to-date monograph in English on Arab theatre, let alone on Arab Shakespeare. Few Arabic plays had been translated into English. Few British or American theatregoers had seen a play in Arabic. In the then tiny but fast-growing field of international Shakespeare appropriation studies (now ‘Global Shakespeare’) there was a great post-9/11 hunger to know more about the Arab world but also a lingering prejudice that Arab interpretations of Shakespeare would necessarily be derivative or crude, purely local in value. Read More
The New York Times covers the mock appeal of Shylock, presided by Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Professor Diana Henderson and MIT students are in Venice, documenting the historic production of The Merchant of Venice and creating materials for publication on the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive. Read More
Since 1990, more than 400 Korean Shakespeare productions have been staged in South Korea, many of them touring beyond the Korean peninsula. Yet now that Korean Shakespeare has become known among both audiences and academics beyond the Korean peninsula, there is a need for greater understanding of the traditional Korean theatre which Korean Shakespeares have so thoroughly adopted. This workshop aims to introduce Korean Shakespeare Boom. Especially it will show how traditional Korean theatres are applied to Shakespearean productions. Read More
Wellesley College celebrates the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with Shakespeare on the Global Stage: A Festival of Performance and Scholarship. To kick off the festival, a keynote lecture will be given by Tiffany Stern and Hyon-u Lee on Saturday April 23 at 4:15pm. Yohangza, an internationally acclaimed theatre troupe from Seoul, South Korea, will perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 7:00pm. Read More
MIT’s Global Shakespeares and “The Merchant in Venice” project commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with the first ever on-site performance of The Merchant of Venice in Venice’s 500 year-old Jewish Ghetto. Compagnia de’ Colombari is staging the play as part of the Ghetto Quincentennial. The play, running from 26-31 July 2016 has attracted the interest of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who will be adjudicating a mock trial involving Shylock and Antonio, the rival merchants of the play. Read More
To celebrate the release of Four Arab Hamlet Plays, a special evening of readings and discussion will take place at the Segal Theatre in New York on March 14, 2016. Co-editor of the book Margaret Litvin, Arab World Regional Editor for the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, will participate via Skype. Read More
Cris Busato Smith, Brazil Regional Editor for the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive, gave two talks at the 22nd Annual ACMRS Conference held 3-6 February 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona: “Brazilian Shakespeares,” delivered on February 4 as part of the panel “Dead at 400: Shakespeare, Cervantes and El Inca Garcilasco,” and “Ophelia in Contemporary Brazilian Art,” delivered on February 6. Read More
How do Arab theatre makers navigate a “World Shakespeare” festival, maneuvering between interesting times in their home countries and the expectations of British and global funders and audiences? A recent article by Margaret Litvin, Saffron Walkling, and Raphael Cormack explores some of the contingencies, ironies, and unexpected beauties of these collaborations. Read More
Making an important new contribution to rapidly expanding fields of study surrounding the adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation (edited by Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin) is the first book to address the intersection of ethics, aesthetics, authority, and authenticity. Read More
Cris Busato Smith, Brazil Regional Editor for MIT Global Shakespeares, delivered a lecture on Tuesday, January 27, 2015 at the Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ entitled “Lady Macbeth and Ophelia: Beyond Drowning and Sleep-walking.” The event was well attended and generated many questions from the audience. Read More
Global Shakespeares European Regional Editor Aneta Mancewicz has published a book Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages (Palgrave 2014) that examines the application of digital media in European Shakespeare performances in the 21st Century. Read More
MIT Literature Postdoctoral Fellow, Emily Griffiths Jones has been appointed Postdoctoral Fellow for a second year as part of MIT’s collaboration with the new Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Read More
Brazil Regional Editor Dr. Anna Steph Camati wrote an article on Patricia Fagundes’ Brazilian adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream which was performed in 2006. Fagundes, who directed, translated, and adapted the production, chose to set the play in a cabaret. Read More
MIT Global Shakespeares founding co-director and George Washington University English Professor Alexa Huang has been named the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Shakespeare at Queen Mary University of London and University of Warwick for 2014-2015. Read More
Check out articles on exciting new films and productions in the special issue of Shakespeare (BSA journal, edited by Global Shakespeares’ co-founder Alexa Huang). In the engaging collection of articles you can read about the meanings of epic in Ryutopia Hamlet in Japanese, a Bollywood Lear made in London, Caribbean trickster figures, a Spanish actor-manager in Madrid and Latin America, and Perttu Leppä’s Finnish film Eight Days to the Premiere. Read More
MIT Global Shakespeares and the Taiwan Shakespeare Database have begun a formal collaboration which the two projects will share videos, coordinate interface and technical design. The Taiwan Shakespeare Database is directed by Beatrice Lei in collaboration with the Research Center for Digital Humanities, NTU. We hope that this alliance will be a model for how digital Shakespeare collections can share materials and enhance their use in research and education throughout the world. Read More
Dr. Cristiane Busato Smith, Global Shakespeares regional editor for Brazil, will chair a session on Friday, February 07, 2014 on Shakespeare and the Catastrophic at the 20th Annual ACMRS Conference, Arizona State University. She will also be presenting a paper entitled “Macbeth: Visions of Apocalypse Now and Then” on Saturday, February 08, 2014. Read More
Hyon-u Lee, Shakespeare scholar, translator, director, performer, and professor at Soon Chun Hyang University, is bringing a troupe to MIT to perform The Taming of the Shrew on October 1, 2013. In this adaptation, Kate is a hip-hop girl, and Petruchio is a Confucianist. This production comments on the harmony between East and West, old and new, patriarchy and feminism. Read More
Global Shakespeares’ partner Fundación Shakespeare Argentina (FSA) has organized several successful events to broad the appreciation for Shakespeare in Argentina and international recognition of Argentinian performances and interpretations of Shakespeare. Read More
It is easy to incorporate the issues of global Shakespeare or globalization into the standard Shakespeare course. Read More
Five presentations focused on performative, political, historical, and cultural aspects of post-1989 Hamlet productions from Romania, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Serbia. Read More
In the past twenty-five years, the Nós do Morro company consolidated its roots in the heart of Rio de Janeiro and achieved international recognition. Read More
The University of Memphis’ Wanda Rushing: globalization is rarely uniform. Instead, it often involves a peculiar, sometimes contradictory tension between international and local dynamics. Read More
Dr Joshua Edelman and Dr Aneta Mancewicz, research fellows at Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, conducted a workshop entitled ‘Watching the Watching of Shakespeare’. Read More
An actor from China’s Zhejiang Kunju Troupe walking down Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon. Read More
Global Shakespeares editors for Brazil — Liana de Camargo Leão, Anna Stegh Camati, and Cris Busato Smith — traveled to Boston to attend the 2012 Shakespeare Association of America conference. Read More
Video highlights from the Korean Tempest film screening and colloquium which took place in Washington, D.C. November 4-5, 2011. Read More
The foremost Korean director and playwright Oh Tae-suk visits DC (his Tempest won the Herald Angel award at the 2011 Edinburgh Int’l Festival). Read More
“Egyptian Theatre Between Local Contexts and Global Audiences: Shakespeare as a Case Study,” the five-hour workshop will involve about 20 directing and drama criticism students and recent graduates from Cairo-area theatre departments. Read More
The Edinburgh International Festival’s official drama opened on Saturday with a double dose of Shakespeare: King Lear in Mandarin and The Tempest in Korean.
Read Martin Hoyle’s review from the Financial Times.
Read the review from the Edinburgh Festival Guide.
The Global Shakespeares editors, collaborators and advisory board members have been a major presence at the World Shakespeare Congress meeting in Prague this week, chairing 10 events, offering 11 seminar papers and 11 talks at panels and workshops Read More
MIT faculty and collaborators from across the world create new classes that integrate theatrical and literary approaches to Global Shakespeare using the materials of the archive as well as on-line multimedia essay tools and virtual and in-person sharing of classes. Read More
