You are here

J Nayar, Sheila

Sheila J. Nayar Greensboro College, North Carolina, USA

Sheila J Nayar is a professor of English, communication and media studies at Greensboro College, North Carolina. Her book Cinematically Speaking won the 2011 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology. She is also the author of The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the “Genuinely” Religious Film, which explores filmic experiences of the sacred vis-à-vis orality and literacy.

Her essays on the intersections of orality, literacy, and film have appeared in numerous journals, including Film Quarterly, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, PMLA, and Visual Anthropology. Several of them have been reprinted—in The Bollywood Reader (eds. Dudrah and Desai, 2008), in The Cult Film Reader (eds. Mathijs and Mendik, 2008), and in Of Ong & Media Ecology (eds. Farrell and Soukup, 2013). Nayar has also published on the intersection of orality and literacy vis-à-vis medieval literature. Essays in this regard can be found in the books Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (ed. Crocker) and Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-first Century (eds. Chickering, Franzen, and Yaeger, 2013), as well as in the journal Exemplaria.

Also forthcoming is another book, Dante’s Sacred Poem (2014), which offers a novel commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy; a chapter on Hinduism for The Routledge Companion to Religion and Popular Culture (eds. Lyden and Mazur, 2014); and an essay in the journal Religion and Literature (2013).