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Faculty of Arts - English

The Department of English at Jadavpur University was established in 1955 initially to provide language and humanities teaching to students of technology, but it quickly developed a research and teaching programme in English literature in its own right. Today it is arguably one of the foremost departments of English Literature in India, if not Asia. Many of its faculty members are award-winning internationally recognized scholars, and its alumni occupy senior positions in academia, the print and electronic media, publishing, the world of letters, theatre, cinema, the arts, corporate communications, advertising, design, web content development and related fields. In the early 1990s the Department was first recognized by the UGC as a department worthy of special assistance, and became the first Department of English in the country to be included under the UGC's Special Assistance Programme. A decade later it was awarded the status of a Centre of Advanced Study.

Teaching has always been a high priority for the Department, with a good deal of contact between students and teachers. Faculty are free to design courses and in recent years they have offered courses in new fields such as (among others), popular culture and music, Western attitudes to the 'Orient', aspects of the Renaissance, queer theory, history of the book, aboriginal and settler colony literatures, editing, textual criticism, postcolonial studies, drama and creative writing. Some of the courses include practical training as well as lecture-based teaching. While the urge to excel is high, and the burden of coursework can be quite heavy, students are also given guidance and mentoring and a good deal of freedom to use their initiative in their work. This prepares them for competitive careers in their chosen fields after they graduate.

The Department also focuses on research and has a fairly large population of M.Phil and Ph.D. scholars who bring an inquiring edge to the Department's preoccupations. International and national level seminars are held two or three times a year and senior scholars and faculty present papers alongside delegates from all over the world.

The Department also has an active publishing programme, in partnership with various academic publishers, and each year one or two volumes of articles or selected papers is brought out. The Department also publishes an annual peer-reviewed journal titled Jadavpur University Essays and Studies.

Distinguished scholars from all over the world regularly visit and lecture at the Department, while the department's own faculty have a long record of visiting other institutions for research purposes. Over the years these interactions have enhanced the Department's cosmpolitanism and profile in the world, to the great benefit of the students.

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Courses Offered
Specialization Subjects Offered
Infrastructural Facilities
Academic contribution
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On-going Research Projects
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Contact

Head of the department :
Prof. Ananda Lal


Contact No.(s) :

Telephone :
(033) 2414-6681(O), 2414-6666(Extn. 2224)

Fax :
(033) 2413-7903

Email :
hod@english.jdvu.ac.in