School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-60 of 102 Results
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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. Shifted Landscapes, a documentary feature in production, presents a mosaic of stories depicting the environmental, cultural, and psychological landscapes of California amidst the ongoing climate crisis. His 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.
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Jisha Menon
Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies, Director of Stanford Global Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioJisha Menon is the Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies and Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Comparative Literature. She is Chair of the Department of Theater and Performance Studies. Previously, she served as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of Stanford Global Studies, Denning Faculty Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, and Faculty Director of the Center for South Asia.
Menon is a scholar of transnational performance studies whose work explores the intersections of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Her scholarship takes performance as a generative analytical category for understanding how powerful political and cultural formations are inhabited, negotiated, and contested in everyday life. Her current book project, Law, Affect, and the Performance of Personhood (under contract with Cambridge University Press), explores how legal practices produce a particular liberal conception of the person and how this conception differs from more plural and discontinuous understandings of personhood. It argues that attending to the performed and fictive constitution of the person in law reveals the artifice -- and the aesthetics -- at the heart of jurisprudence.
Menon's books and edited volumes explore arts and aesthetics in relation to neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial nationalism, secularism, and geopolitical conflict. Her latest 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 rethink 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, 2009) and Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics (with Milija Gluhovic) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.)
Menon's university leadership has been recognized with Stanford’s inaugural Outstanding Leader Award from the Faculty Women’s Forum. She has served on the Stanford Faculty Senate as well as on the Steering Committee for the Faculty Senate. Her contributions to the field include leadership in Performance Studies International, as well as service on the editorial boards of leading journals and book series.
In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Menon is a director, actor, and playwright. Her co-authored play, City of Gardens, (with Abhishek Majumdar) was published by Dawran Press in 2026. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. -
Richard Meyer
Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History
BioAreas of Specialization:
20th-century American art and visual culture
