Nayar says her primary goals at the College are to teach and to learn—in her words, “to offer and receive concepts, ideas and perspectives that are new, fresh, and perhaps a bit divergent from the norm.” She has worked to expand the global perspective in existing English courses and to create new courses with a global focus, including a class in world cinema. Nayar also helped to spearhead the College's new honors curriculum, whose two-year humanities sequence promotes the development of a strong foundation in the historical evolution of intellectual thought.

In recent years, Nayar's scholarly focus has been in the area of orality and literacy, especially as these intersect with visual narrative. She came to the topic quite by accident, by way of researching Bollywood cinema. “I began studying popular films from India while participating in a National Endowment of the Humanities summer seminar on visual anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. I never imagined at the time that that work would lead to the development of an innovative paradigm for how visual narrative epistemically ‘works.'” Nevertheless, what she discovered was that the very fabric of Bollywood formula films, from the 1950s to the 1990s especially, was heavily contoured by oral characteristics of narrative and performance. “How we tell and engage with stories is highly conditioned by our ability to separate ourselves as knowers (to paraphrase Eric Havelock) from what we know, and this separation is significantly enabled by technologies such as chirography and print. Literacy, in other words, has substantially changed the nature of narrative—and this is the case regardless of whether one is discussing film or novels.” Subsequent fellowships to study India at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the Old French fabliaux and the medieval sense of the comic at Yale University rounded out her basis for making her theoretical argument and for applying orality-literacy theory more broadly to narrative.

Nayar's eclectic studies have spawned articles in Film Quarterly, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Visual Anthropology, amongst others, and are forthcoming in PMLA and Exemplaria. Her book Cinematically Speaking: The Orality-Literacy Paradigm for Visual Narrative is forthcoming with Hampton Press's Media Ecology Series. Currently she is working on a new book project entitled “The Story of the Story,” a heuristic that explores the influence of orality and literacy on the evolution of literature, particularly as that evolution is reflected in the Western literary canon.

Nayar still maintains her interest in creative writing, too. Though she left screenwriting a while ago—albeit with a produced film and a stint at the Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab to her name—her captivation with the Middle Ages while at Yale inspired a novel, "The Translation," which she is now on the verge of completing. “In many ways it was my experience as a storyteller that led to the excavation of the orality-literacy paradigm for visual narrative. Creating narrative is an act very unlike analyzing, let alone deconstructing, narrative. But just as my experience with storytelling infuses my scholarship, so too does my scholarship infuse my storytelling. I blur the boundaries somewhat indiscriminately—a tendency I definitely take with me into the classroom.”

Nayar earned the bachelor of arts degree in communication studies from Concordia University in Montreal and was awarded the master of fine arts degree in film from Columbia University. She is a member of the Media Ecology Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and currently serves on the honors committee and as secretary of the Greensboro College faculty.

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