Yassified Shakespeare

Yassified Shakespeare is a multimedia project that interrogates how academic labor functions while simultaneously producing traditional academic products. "Yassified Shakespeare" is a genre of Millennial and post-Millennial appropriation of Shakespeare’s name, persona, and/or work that queers itself in the process of adaptation. It remixes Shakespeare’s cultural capital with a sexy, genre-specific, hyper-contemporary aesthetic—as in & Juliet, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Renaissance faire performers who become Shakespeare, and Shakespearean remixes and appropriations on TikTok.

As a planned monograph and multimedia project, Yassified Shakespeare asks: How do we, as scholars, communicate with each other, our students, and the public? What platforms can we use to best reach wide audiences, and how does interaction with those audiences in turn feed academic inquiry? What do we gain from incorporating public-facing scholarship at every step of the process when we undertake a large academic project, and how can that labor feed itself to create a new paradigm of academic writing? And what does this all have to do with Shakespeare? What happens when we remix the early modern and the digitized trendy? What does it say about audiences, popular culture (both historical and contemporary), and adaptation? As we’re writing and making content, we’re working to demystify the process of academic publication. Our TikTok uses principles of applied theatre (community building, educating audiences, inviting collaboration from these audiences, and giving voice to marginalized peoples) to pull back the curtain of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how it works. TikTok: @yassifiedshax.

Principle Investigator

Danielle Rosvally, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre and Dance

Co-PI

Trevor Boffone, PhD
Content Creator