WSSU Will Host Lecture on “Love Bollywood Style”
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- Sheila J. Nayar, associate professor of English and communication studies at
Greensboro College, will lecture on “Love Bollywood Style” on Thursday, October 11, at 11:00 a.m. in
Room 228 of the Hall Patterson Building on the campus of Winston-Salem State University (WSSU).
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will explore the three historical periods of Bollywood
cinema in India and discuss how love is portrayed in them, with clips from songs to illustrate the
different expressions of love in Indian films and India. Nayar is associate professor of English and
communication studies at Greensboro College where she teaches courses in literary and cultural theory,
film theory and analysis, and basic composition. She is also the assistant director of the George Center
for Honors Studies.
Nayar will be a visiting scholar at WSSU October 11-12 as part of a National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) funded project on integrating India into the liberal arts curriculum. In addition to her
public lecture, Nayar will also conduct a workshop for WSSU faculty on “Disorientalizing Bollywood and
Teaching Using Film.”
Trained as a screenwriter, Nayar turned her attention to film analysis after an NEH fellowship on visual
anthropology at UC-Berkeley. That experience led to an academic interest in the popular cinema of
India, also known as Bollywood. More recently she has focused on how visual narrative in film is actively
shaped in societies, such as India, where much of the population is less familiar with print and formal
literacy. This is the subject of her first book, Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for
Visual Narrative, which won the 2011 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of
Media Ecology. She also is the author of The Sacred and the Cinema and has published widely in a
variety of journals, including Film Quarterly, and Visual Anthropology, and on subjects as diverse as
biblical spectaculars, “sound” in silent film, the Old French medieval fabliau, and Beowulf. Her next book
project, forthcoming with Continuum, is on Dante's Divine Comedy.
Nayar has an M.F.A. degree in film from Columbia University and a B.A. with specialization in
communication studies from Concordia University (Loyola College), Montreal. She has held NEH
summer institute fellowships to study India at the East-West Center/University of Hawaii at Manoa;
visual anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley; and medieval literature at Yale University.
Her prior experience in independent film screenwriting and script development includes credit as cowriter of an independent film and selection for the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab.