Hello! My name is Yujin Jang, and I am a PhD student in Pitt’s Literature program in the Department of English. With the support of the Humanities Engage’s Curricular Development Opportunity for Ph.D. Students, and through working with my faculty collaborator, Prof. Caro Pirri, this summer I am planning to develop a module “Twenty-first-century World Shakespeare”  for the undergraduate course,  Introduction to Shakespeare. This course will be taught by Prof. Pirri in the Fall of 2022 and takes place every semester in the Department of English at Pitt.

Twenty-first-century World Shakespeare aims to diversify current pedagogical practices for teaching Shakespeare, by focusing on how Shakespeare’s works performed and reproduced across the globe can be considered as international cultural capital. Moving beyond existing views of Shakespeare as a symbol of Western culture, I am designing this module to enhance students’ understandings of the multilingual and transnational Shakespeare as well as contemporary audience’s cross-cultural spectatorship. This module enhances student engagement, by leading them to search and write through MIT Global Shakespeares: Video and Performance Archive. Accessing this digital archive, which provides access to audiovisual recordings, critical reviews, and personal essays about Shakespeare’s plays performed across the world, students will learn about various contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s plays in different languages (English subtitles are provided on this platform) and discuss different geopolitical, historical, and social contexts reflected in productions/writings that they will choose to closely examine.     

While developing this module, I recently participated in the Humanities Engage’s Archives & Collections Pedagogy workshop, which allowed me to interact with the faculty in Pitt’s University Center for Teaching and Learning as well as the librarians and archivists in the Hillman Library. This workshop enabled me not only to enhance my understandings of object-based learning (OBL) but also to develop my skills to craft learning objectives that can contribute to students’ collections-based learning processes. Particularly, I learned that instructors drawing on methodologies of OBL should be creative to design diverse “student-centered” learning activities which use objects—including artworks, archival materials, and digital productions of unique resources—that can lead students to have profound learning experiences. After this workshop, I concretized my ideas to design an assignment, which gives students a chance to plan and create their digital platforms on which they can practice their public writings while drawing on sources from the Global Shakespeares as well as their personal experiences of Shakespeare’s plays featured across the world. At the same time, I really appreciate the chance to meet with the archivists and librarians at the Hillman during this workshop. While listening to the talks by each of the librarians, I realized the significance of interacting with archivists in pursuing collections-based pedagogy. Also, I would like to express my thankfulness to Rachel Lavenda, who introduced early modern books and printings as collected in the Rare Book Collections at the Hillman Library.

As a literary critic and teacher for Shakespeare Studies, and as an international student trained in the U.S. and South Korea, I have pondered over ways to change my students’ conceptions of Shakespeare as a difficult Western canon and lead them to feel liberated to design creative and interesting activities while exploring transnational receptions and adaptations of Shakespeare. The support of the Humanities Engage will enable me to further this academic goal, particularly by making a collection-based module that encourages students to engage with Shakespearean audience on Global Shakespeares as well as communities in Pittsburgh.