Asian Shakespeare: A Global Conversation with Bi-qi Beatrice Lei and Judy Celine Ick

What is Asian Shakespeare? Is it about Shakespeare in Asia, Shakespeareans in Asia, or Shakespeare Studies in Asia? Do you know that Asia has forever changed the study and performance of Shakespeare around the world? Can anyone study global Shakespeare theatre today without considering Suzuki Tadashi, Ninagawa Yukio, Ong Keng Sen, and Wu Hsing-kuo?

With the vastness and diversity in Asian cultures, languages, scholarship, and performance traditions, Asia is the perfect site to challenge and reinvent Shakespeare studies and to reimagine Shakespeare performance. Dr. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei and Dr. Judy Celine Ick, two prominent and productive Shakespeare scholars will present a glimpse of the performance traditions of Asian Shakespeare. This online event is co-sponsored by UCI’s New Swan Shakespeare Center and Illuminations, Chancellor’s Arts and Culture Initiative. Professors Julia Lupton (English) and Eli Simon (Drama) will co-moderate the conversation.

Biography of the speakers:

Dr. Bi-qi Beatrice Lei is Founding Chair of the Asian Shakespeare Association (ASA). She received her Ph.D. in English from New York University and has published on Sidney, Shakespeare, early modern culture, intercultural theater, films, television, and popular culture. Lei is Founding Director of the Taiwan Shakespeare Database, an open-access online performance archive hosted by National Taiwan University’s Research Center for Digital Humanities, and a co-editor of the Arden series Global Shakespeare Inverted. She taught at National Tsing Hua University and National Taiwan University, and currently serves as Vice-Chair of the International Shakespeare Association (ISA) and Assistant Director of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA).

Dr. Judy Celine Ick is professor and chairperson of the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Asia Fellow and Visiting Research scholar at the University of Malaya. She is a founding member and vice-chairperson of the Asian Shakespeare Association. Ick is the author of Unsex Me Here: Female Power and Shakespearean Tragedy and many articles on Shakespeare, performance, and colonial education in the Philippines. As actor and dramaturg, she has worked with several academic and professional theater companies in the Philippines and Asia.