School of Humanities and Sciences
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Christian V. Mejia
Lecturer
BioChristian Mejia (he/they) believes that light has the ability to transport us to a moment in time and cradle us within a particular place. Light affects our mood, informs our emotional landscape, and enhances the everyday moments that make up our lives. The right light can tell a story that goes beyond words.
Christian’s approach to design seeks to create environments that ask people to lean into and learn something about our shared humanity. His design practice includes live performance, architectural lighting, and immersive entertainment. His work has been seen on stages and in built environments around the world. Some of his most cherished theatrical collaborations include the Geffen Playhouse (Los Angeles), Fountain Theatre (Los Angeles), Edinburgh Fringe Festival (Scotland), ACT (San Francisco), and New Conservatory Theatre Center (San Francisco). His architectural lighting design practice has included work with Universal Creative, Lincoln Center NYC, and global Soho House properties.
Christian received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. See a selection of his work at christianvmejia.com. -
Jisha Menon
Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioJisha Menon is the Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies. She is Professor of Theater and Performance Studies, and (by courtesy) of Comparative Literature. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical theory and performance studies; law and performance; race and the carceral state; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; gender and sexuality; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her current research project, Confessional Performance: The Cultural and Legal Arts of Personhood, explores how legal practices entrench a particular liberal topology of personhood, and how this conception departs from other societies where persons are conceived in more plural and discontinuous ways. The book argues that attending to the fictive constitution of the person within the law allows us to highlight the artifice, indeed, the aesthetics that are central to jurisprudence. Her four books explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her newest book, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India (Northwestern UP, 2021) considers the city and the self as aesthetic projects that are renovated in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms in India. The study explores how discourses of beauty are mobilized toward anti-democratic ends. Sketching out scenes of urban aspiration and its dark underbelly, the book delineates the creative and destructive potential of India’s lurch into contemporary capitalism. Her first book, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge UP, 2013), examines the affective and performative dimensions of nation-making. The book recuperates the idea of "mimesis" to think about political history and the crisis of its aesthetic representation, while examining the mimetic relationality that undergirds the encounter between India and Pakistan. She is also co-editor of two volumes: Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (with Patrick Anderson) (Palgrave-Macmillan Press, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.) She has published essays on the Indian partition, diasporic feminist theatre, political violence and performance, transnational queer theory, and neoliberal urbanism. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.