Biography

Alexa HUANG

Alexa C. Y. Huang is Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and International Affairs, Department of English, George Washington University, Washington D.C. (U.S.A.) and Research Affiliate in Literature at MIT, Cambridge, MA (U.S.A.).

Alexa Huang is the author of Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press), a study of the interactions between ideas of "Shakespeare" and "China" in fiction, film, and theatre in an age of globalization. The book received the Modern Language Association's (MLA) Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize, the Colleagues' Choice Award of the International Convention for Asian Scholars (ICAS), and an honorable mention of New York University's Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre.

Part of her work focuses on racial and national histories that connect imaginative writing to performances on stage and on screen, which led to the publications of Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace (Purdue University Press; co-edited) and Class, Boundary and Social Discourse in the Renaissance (co-edited). She has served as the guest editor of special issues of Shakespeare (Journal of the British Shakespeare Association), Asian Theatre Journal, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and has contributed to MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Bulletin, Theatre Journal, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Yearbook, Shakespeare Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, The Shakespearean International Yearbook, Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, World Literature Today, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare and the Second World War (University of Toronto Press), The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, The Afterlife of Ophelia (Palgrave), Weyward Macbeth (Palgrave), William Shakespeare's Sonnets, for the First Time Globally Represented, a Quatercentenary 1609-2009, The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, and other peer-reviewed journals and books.

Her research has been supported by several institutions and grant agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, China Times Cultural Foundation, International Shakespeare Association, Folger Institute, Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Stanford University, and others. Further projects underway include a book on literary humor and a book on ethics and intercultural performance.

As Research Affiliate in Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Prof. Huang is involved in the Global Shakespeare curriculum initiative of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and co-founded, with Peter Donaldson, Shakespeare Performance in Asia (SPIA) and Global Shakespeare. Both open-access digital video archives have been included in the MLA Bibliography and World Shakespeare Bibliography.

To make films and performance videos a sharable resource for teaching and research, she has co-founded Global Shakespeare, an open-access digital project at MIT, and served as the video curator of "Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550-1700," an exhibition at the Folger Library (curator: Timothy Billings).

She is currently at work on a number of collaborative digital research and archival projects including VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning).

At George Washington University Prof. Huang is a member of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI). Further, she has been involved in the larger artistic and academic communities in the U.S. and abroad as the General Editor (with Tom Bishop and Graham Bradshaw) of the Shakespearean International Yearbook, member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Committee on the New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, board member of the Internet Shakespeare Editions (based in Victoria, Canada), guest speaker at the Edinburgh International Festival, and consultant for several other theatre festivals.

She has appeared on BBC Radio, BBC TV, and other television and radio programs to discuss cultural globalization. In addition, stories about her work have appeared in media outlets in English and Chinese.

Bibliography

Shakespeare on Screen / in Performance

Books

Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009), paperback and cloth editions. 350 pp.
Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia and Cyberspace, co-edited with Charles Ross (Purdue University Press, 2009). 306 pp.
Class, Boundary, and Social Discourse in the Renaissance, co-edited with I-chun Wang and Mary Theis (Kaohsiung, Taiwan: Center for Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Liberal Arts, National Sun Yat-sen University, 2007). 184 pp.

Editorial Projects

Special Issue Editor, Asian Theatre Journal, 28.1 (Spring 2011).
Special Issue Editor, Shakespeare (Journal of the British Shakespeare Association), 2013.
The Shakespearean International Yearbook, general editor.
Special issue "Asian Shakespeares on Screen: Two Films in Perspective," Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 4.2 (2009).

Refereed Journal Articles

"Global Shakespeare 2.0 and the Task of the Performance Archive." Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 38-51.
"The Theatricality of Religious Rhetoric: Gao Xingjian and the Meaning of Exile." Theatre Journal 63.3 (2011): 365-379.
"Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: The Dialectics between the Global and the Local in Lao She's Fiction." MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 69. 1 (March 2008): 97-118.
"Asian Shakespeares in Europe: From the Unfamiliar to the Defamiliarised." Shakespearean International Yearbook 8 (2008): 51-70.
"Shakespearean Localities and the Localities of Shakespeare Studies." Shakespeare Studies 35 (2007): 186-204.
"Shakespeare, Performance, and Autobiographical Interventions." Shakespeare Bulletin: A Journal of Performance Criticism and Scholarship 24. 2 (Summer 2006): 31-47.
"Impersonation, Autobiography, and Cross-Cultural Adaptation: Lee Kuo-Hsiu's Shamlet." Asian Theatre Journal 22.1 (Spring 2005): 122-137.

Refereed Book Chapters

"Shakespeare and Translation." The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete, and Ramona Wray. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. pp. 68-87.
"The Paradox of Female Agency." The Afterlife of Ophelia, ed. Kaara Peterson and Deanne Williams. New York: Palgrave, 2011. In press.
"Asian American Theatre Re-imagined: Shogun Macbeth in New York." Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, ed. Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson. New York: Palgrave, 2009. pp. 121-125.
"Pastiche and Identity in Taiwan's Postmodern Theatre: Stan Lai and Buddhism." Taiwan Literature and History. Ed. Kuo-Ch'ing Tu. University of California, Santa Barbara, Center for Taiwan Studies, 2007. 213-222.
"'No World without Verona Walls'? Shakespeare in the Provincial Cultural Marketplace." Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia. Ed. Poonam Trivedi and Minami Ryutan. London: Routledge, 2009. pp. 251-268.

Digital Humanities Projects

Global Shakespeares, open-access digital video archive co-founded by Alex C. Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson (launched in 2010)
Shakespeare Performance in Asia, open-access digital video archive co-founded by Alex C. Y. Huang and Peter Donaldson (launched in 2009)
GloPAD, Global Performing Arts Database at Cornell (Collaborator)
Video Curator, Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550-1700 (curator: Timothy Billings), Folger Library, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2009-Jan. 2010.
Curator, Video Installation for the "Shakespeare Encyclopedia" Open House at the Shakespeare Association of America annual conference, Chicago, April 1-4, 2010.

Contributions to Shakespeare on Screen in Francophonia

"Digital Shakespeare" (2012)

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