ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT
Legacy
Established in 1946, the Department of English at Indraprastha College for Women is one of the oldest in the College. Given its history, the Department has been closely involved in the growth of the College and the University, and has contributed consistently to their academic and cultural life. Home to pioneering intellectuals and path-breaking scholarship and activism in the past, the Department strives to consolidate and maintain this legacy, and holds itself to high standards in academic performance and social responsibility.
The Department prides itself in having continually engaged with questions of socially inclusive teaching and with the disparities marking access to higher education in India, which ultimately reflect larger social inequalities. The faculty’s approach to teaching is therefore strongly learner-centric to accommodate students’ special and idiosyncratic needs. At the same time, the Department has a history of academic excellence, which is in evidence in the consistently good results of its students and in the high number of alumnae who pursue higher studies in core and allied disciplines. It is at the intersection of these different pedagogical imperatives that the English Department finds its unique calling.
Academic Profile, Pedagogical Aims and Learning Outcomes
The department hosts a wide range of specialisms and a diversity of research interests which are based on core disciplinary as well as cross-, trans-, and inter-disciplinary knowledge. These interests range across Translation Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Disability Studies, Postcolonial Studies and South Asian Literatures, Popular and Visual Cultures, and Film Studies, among others. Feeding into the department’s curricular and co-curricular engagement with the students, faculty research interests find a tangible expression in the practice of mentoring student papers, which are presented at the Annual Department Conferences and published in the Department Student Journal.
Further, the department is equally engaged with concerns of pedagogy and effective teaching-learning. It works with the objective of making students informed and skilled readers of texts –whether written or performed or visual or filmic– which reflects the complexity of the world we live in. It aims to give its students exposure to a wide array of critical perspectives and methodologies available in the discipline today, through classroom teaching, student seminars, and other academic society events.
An Honors student in the department will:
§ Identify and place, in the appropriate historical contexts and frameworks of literary and intellectual history, the works of literature in English comprising the University curriculum for an undergraduate degree in the discipline.
§ Analyze prescribed literary texts for their response to social and political organization, literary and cultural traditions, influences, and readerships or audiences.
§ Apply these categories of analysis to texts outside the curriculum, for student research papers and other academic projects.
Achievements
The Department has organised two conferences which have been significant interventions in their respective research fields – a UGC funded National Conference titled ‘The game’s afoot …’ Sport, Literature and Culture in 2011, and an International Conference titled Revisiting Shakespeare in Indian Literature and Culture in collaboration with the Shakespeare Society of India, in 2013. The English Literary Society has held numerous talks and workshops by erudite scholars like Rakhshanda Jalil, Prof Tanika Sarkar, Robin S. Ngangnom, Sharanya Mannivanan, among others. It also organises the ‘Kamath Literary Award’, an annual intra-college essay-writing competition that provides a platform for all students of the college to hone their creative and academic writing skills. The most recent Annual Students’ Conferences on 'Fragments & Frameworks (2021-2022), ‘Pandemics, Pestilence, Privacy: Literary and Artistic Frames’ (2020-21) and ‘Meme Age’ (2019-20) were organised with the aim of engaging with contemporary socio-political as well as cultural developments from a literary point of view.
Several department faculty members have also been involved in the formulation of syllabi for undergraduate courses in English at the University of Delhi. In the last five years, giving a fillip to student research work, research papers of several students have been published in the department journal, Inkspill, the annual edition of which is posted on the web portal.
Courses Taught
NEP: UGCF 2022 English, LOCF English, CBCS B.A. (H) English [Core, DCE, AECC, SEC]; CBCS B.A.(Programme) [Language, Discipline, AECC, GE, SEC]; Other Honours Courses [AECC, GEC]; M.A. (Tutorials)
Last Updated on: 22 December 2023