School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 261-270 of 514 Results
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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. -
Javier Mejia
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioJavier Mejia is an economist whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux.
Most of Javier’s research explores how social interactions have shaped the economy in the long term. He brings together theoretical and empirical methods from economics and conceptual tools from anthropology to the study of history. This has led him to explore an extensive set of historical objects. He has studied entrepreneurs in Colombia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industrial elites in Morocco in the late 20th century, tribal societies in North Africa in the 19th century, early Muslim communities in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula between the 7th and 9th centuries, and political elites in Colombia and the US in the early 19th century.
Javier has teaching experience in multicultural environments, having taught at universities in Latin America, the United States, and the Middle East. He has taught courses on economic growth, economic history, and economic theory. At Stanford, he offers two courses that jointly provide an overview of economic evolution from a global-history and moral-philosophy perspective. On the one hand, Wealth of Nations studies the origins of economic development, the moral dilemmas underneath the development process, and the path that led to the configuration of the modern global economy. On the other hand, Societal Collapse studies the causes of economic decline, the social and political consequences of that decline, and the path that led to the disappearance of some of the most prosperous societies in human history.
Javier is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is a Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist. -
Jamie Meltzer
Professor of Art and Art History
BioProfessor Jamie Meltzer teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Documentary Film. His feature documentary films have been broadcast nationally on PBS and have screened at numerous film festivals worldwide. His latest short documentary, not even for a moment do things stand still, premiered at SXSW in March 2022, winning a Special Jury Mention in Visual Reflection. The film provides an observational glimpse into a COVID-19 art installation, dropping into intimate moments of people honoring their loved ones, and interrogating the role of mourning and closure during an unfolding tragedy. It was published as a New York Times Op-Doc in April 2022. Huntsville Station, a short documentary film directed with Chris Filippone, was featured as a New York Times Op-Docs and premiered at Berlinale and SXSW in 2020. The film observes the scene at a bus station - where dozens of inmates just released on parole take in their first moments of freedom before taking the bus home. True Conviction (broadcast on Independent Lens in May 2018), a co-production of ITVS and the recipient of a Sundance Institute grant and a MacArthur grant, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival where it received a Special Jury Mention in the Best Documentary Feature category. Informant (2012), about a revolutionary activist turned FBI informant, was released in theaters in the US and Canada in Fall 2013 by Music Box Films and KinoSmith. Previous films include: Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Story (Independent Lens, 2003), about the shadowy world of song-poems, Welcome to Nollywood (PBS Broadcast, 2007), an investigation into the wildly successful Nigerian movie industry, and La Caminata (2009), a short film about a small town in Mexico that runs a simulated border crossing as a tourist attraction.
