Branislav Jakoljevic
Assistant Professor, avant-garde and experimental theater, performance theory, critical theory
Jisha Menon
Assistant Professor, postcolonial theory and performance studies
Branislav Jakoljevic
Assistant Professor, avant-garde and experimental theater, performance theory, critical theory . Branislav Jakovljevic joined the Department of Drama in the fall of 2006. His areas of scholarly interests include the avant-garde (across disciplines—theater, literature, visual arts, music—and periods—European avant-gardes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, post-World War II avant-garde in Europe and America), theater history, dramaturgy, performance theory, philosophy of the event, and, most recently, performance and law. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in avant-garde, performance theory, and theater history. He has published essays on a broad variety of subjects, from history of late nineteenth-century theater, to Russian and Soviet avant-garde, to contemporary American experimental performance (The Wooster Group, composer John Adams, the site-specific performance group Skewed Visions). His works have been published in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Theater) and in Europe (Serbia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, and Belgium). His book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Jakovljevic received his B.A. in Dramaturgy from the School of Theater, Film, Television, and Radio in Belgrade, Serbia, where he also worked professionally in theater as playwright and dramaturg and wrote theater criticism. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Department of Performance Studies, New York University.
Jisha Menon
Assistant Professor, postcolonial theory and performance studies. Jisha Menon specializes in postcolonial theory and performance studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and secularity, gender and nationalism, cosmopolitanism and globalization. She has published essays on the Indian partition, transnational feminist theatre, and sexual and political violence in South Asia. Her current project, Bordering on Drama: Community and Nation in Postcolonial India, is an interdisciplinary book-length study that considers embodied, political performances to examine the theatricality of nationalism in South Asia. She is also co-editor, with Patrick Anderson, of a volume of essays, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (Palgrave-Macmillan Press) that explores the coimbrication of violence, performance, and modernity in a variety of geopolitical spaces.