Essays

Shakespeare’s plays enjoy a great deal of popularity across the world, yet most of us study Shakespeare’s local productions. Alexa Alice Joubin‘s Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford 2021) addresses this gap through a wide-ranging analysis of stage and film adaptations related to Japan, South Korea, China, Singapore, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the US and UK, including Asian American works….

 Dear English Department students,  Welcome back, and a special welcome to first-year and newly declared English majors just joining us for the first time! It feels exciting (and a bit intimidating) to contemplate gathering again in our classrooms for the first time since the pandemic erupted. As we’ve prepared to re-open our suite on the…

COVID-19 has exacerbated anti-Asian racism—the demonization of a group of people based on their perceived social value—in the United States in the cultural and political life.       Professor Alexa Alice Joubin recently published an article that analyzes the language of racism and misogyny. Her article also offers strategies for inclusion during and after the…

In Professor Alexa Alice Joubin‘s recent op-ed, she championed the value of the humanities in a globalized world. The world needs good question askers as much as it needs good problem solvers. Before solving problems, we need to first identify the problems.  Great stories are often strangers at home. The best of them defamiliarize banal…

On February 16th, author T Kira Madden hosted a conversation and Q&A with Professor Annie Liontas’ Creative Nonfiction writing workshop class. Her debut memoir Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. Student April Mihalovich created an alternate cover for the…

    In early December, alumni Cameron LeBrun and Joey Garber dropped in on Professor Annie Liontas’ Nonfiction Workshop. The GW graduates collaborated on their new and innovative podcast Double Feature: Hear Me & Drinking with Ghosts. The 11-episode podcast is a humorous and fresh take on “true” crime, that investigates the murder of Alaska Curtis from…

GW English will hold a celebration of the publication of A Cultural History of Disability in 2021.  This will most likely be an online event as our 2020 celebration was postponed due to the pandemic.  We will announce the details of this event in early 2021, but in the meantime: the six volumes are open access…

  On November 19, New York Times-Bestselling author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah hosted an intimate conversation with the students of Professor Annie Liontas’ Advanced Fiction class. Adjei-Brenyah’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. His debut book Friday Black was…

  Jeannie Vanasco is the author of memoirs, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (2019) and The Glass Eye(2017).  Vanasco visited Professor Page’s class, American Memoir, after they had read her memoir, The Glass Eye, whichexplores her grief for her late dad and his grief for his late daughter, Jeanne. She shared with students her process, ethos,…