CSA Welcomes Incoming Faculty Director Jisha Menon

We are delighted to welcome Professor Jisha Menon as our new Faculty Director as Professor Thomas Blom Hansen steps down as CSA director after 6 years of dynamic leadership. Jisha Menon is Associate Professor of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. She teaches courses at the intersection of postcolonial theory and performance studies. 

She received her M.A. in English Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and her Ph.D. in Drama from Stanford University. She has previously taught in the English Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She has published essays on the Indian partition, transnational feminist theatre, and sexual and political violence in South Asia. 

She is co-editor, with Patrick Anderson, of a volume of essays, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict that explores the themes of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces. She is author of The Performance Of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, And The Memory Of Partition. She is also at work on a second project, Pedestrian Acts: Performing the City in Neoliberal Bangalore, which considers new narrations of selfhood that are produced at the intersection of neoliberal state, global art markets and consumer fantasy. 

She brings a range of expertise in Humanities broadly and on gender and sexuality, violence, urbanism and transnationalism with her to the Center for South Asia. She also has extensive experience in university-level committees. All of this will lead to a wonderful set of new directions and emphases for the Center.  Welcome, Jisha!