Visiting Scholars
Visiting scholars come to NYU Performance Studies from all over the world to conduct independent research with our faculty members. During their residencies, visiting scholars give informal talks on their research, audit graduate courses, and meet with faculty to receive feedback on their research. If you are interested in becoming a visiting scholar with the department, please visit the following link for more information. Please note that space is limited and we can only host up to six scholars a year.
2023-2024 Visiting Scholars
Lauren Mancia
Lauren Mancia is an Associate Professor of History at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and an Associate Professor of Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is also a lecturer on staff at The Met Cloisters. Mancia holds a PhD From Yale, an MA from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a BA from Columbia. A scholar of medieval Christian monasticism, she is the author of two books, Meditation and Prayer in the Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Monastery: Struggling Towards God (2023) and Emotional Monasticism: Affective Piety in the Eleventh-Century Monastery of John of Fécamp (2019); she has also authored many articles about devotional experience and the history of emotion in medieval Europe. As a Visiting Scholar in Performance Studies at NYU from 2023-24, Mancia is thinking about how scholars might better understand medieval religious experience using tools of Performance Studies, and, especially, how she might better communicate her ideas about medieval religion to contemporary audiences through performance and curated experiences.
Maria Jose Arjona
Maria José Arjona is a Colombian multidisciplinary performance artist whose work proposes through radical poetic gestures a unique form of political resistance. At a time when political art is understood primarily as political activism, Arjona instead treats the body as a site for subtle and complex rearticulations and questionings of normative conditioning and violence. She moves away from a focus on the identity of the artist to highlight the organic, expansive shared potential of the body, a body that in its centrality may not be individual or biographical, but collective and unconditioned.