Payal Priya
India, Hindi
Payal Priya is a Senior Research Fellow since July 2021 at the Centre for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has taught several courses in English language and literature at the undergraduate level and has been a language trainer for almost 4 years.
She is pursuing her doctoral research, after completing her Masters in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi, where she was an active member of an amateur theatre group and participated and won accolades in theatre, and public speaking. Her doctoral research is titled ‘Performing Rāmlīlā(s): Sacrality, Memory and the Modern Interface’. It looks at the meaning of the sacral in Indian performing arts ( particularly Rāmlīlā) and the methods of creating the sacral in a performance- geographically, aesthetically, psychologically and historically.
Her work also looks at the memory of the sacral and how it is transformed, transmuted and transported in urban spaces and with the diaspora through a semiotic translation. Her areas of interest are performance studies, memory studies, identity studies, Indian aesthetics and philosophy. Payal has presented her work at several national and international conferences , attended courses and workshops in India and abroad. She has published articles and academic papers on her areas of interest and teaching. She also writes short stories and poems, her works have been published in reputed magazines and anthologies and has also taken a workshop on Creative Writing.
As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Payal is teaching Hindi at University of Notre Dame. Through this program she wishes share the culture of her country , experience another culture and understand and explore in this cultural exchange the possibilities of building a more inclusive and accepting world.