School of Humanities and Sciences
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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. She serves as the Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. 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 humanities; affect theory, cities, and capitalism; cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Her current research project, Law, Affect, and the Performance of Personhood (under contract, Cambridge UP) 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 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 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.) In addition to her scholarly work, she 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 in Vancouver, Canada.
