Ms. Payal Priya is Senior Research Fellow 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 four years. She is pursuing her doctoral research, after completing her master’s in English literature from St. Xavier’s College, Ranchi, where she was part of an amateur theatre group. She has participated and won accolades in acting and public speaking and is trained in Kathak. Her doctoral research looks at the meaning of the sacral, particularly in Rāmlīlā, and the methods of creating the sacral in a performance. 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 semiotic translations. Her areas of interest are performance studies, memory studies, identity studies, Indian aesthetics, and philosophy.
Ms. Priya has presented her work at several national and international conferences and has published several academic papers. She writes short stories and poems, which have been published in reputable magazines and anthologies. She designed and conducted a workshop on creative writing for Umran, a Delhi based NGO.
As a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant, Ms. Priya is teaching Hindi at the University of Notre Dame. Through this program, she wishes to share the culture of her country, experience another culture, and understand and explore the possibilities of building a more inclusive and accepting world.