This course offers an introduction to Classical Greek Tragedy and aims to explore the conception of tragedy as it developed in 5th Century BCE in Athens. Students who take this course will study a selection of plays from the three major playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In addition, they will consider Aristotle’s analysis in his Poetics to inform their exploration and understanding of ancient tragedy. This course aims to develop students’ literary analysis and appreciation skills, requiring them to offer critical analysis and personal response to the plays. The course aims to explore the understanding of tragedy as it developed in Athens in 5th Century BCE, the socio-political and historical context in which the plays were written and performed, and the moral religious, cultural, and social values portrayed in the plays. The course will delve into various themes and concepts represented in these plays, encouraging students to consider the relevance and continued interest of these plays to the modern audience.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh.

This course offers an introduction to the language and culture of Ancient Greece, through a grounding in the classical Greek language, providing at the same time an overview of the culture of 5th-4th Century Athens by the close study of a text in adapted Greek based on readings from Herodotus, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Thucydides, and Aristophanes. This course aims to give a wide-ranging view of the ancient Greek world through the language of those who thought and communicated in it. By introducing students to a reading of texts in the original language, the goal is to offer an experience and understanding of the ancient world while providing a solid foundation that would lead to greater fluency and confidence in reading and understanding Greek texts in their context.
Course Instructor : Adity Singh

This course is a continuation of Classical Greek I and offers further training in the language and culture of Ancient Greece, through a grounding in the classical Greek language, providing at the same time an overview of the ethos of 5th -4th Century Athens via a selection of readings (both in adapted Greek and in English) from Aristophanes, Plato, and Herodotus. In Classical Greek II, the students will read continuous extracts from Aristophanes’ Clouds, Plato’s Apology and Euthydemus, and from Herodotus’ Histories in adapted Greek. This will be supplemented by an introduction to the history, culture, and society of classical Athens via a selection of reading (in English) from Aristophanes, Plato, and Herodotus.
Course Instructor: Adity Singh

This course aims to inculcate in students a critical bent of mind to appreciate literary works beyond the preferred readings of the institutionalized canon. Collating texts from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic realms, the course helps students understand various genres of literature, situate them within and outside their social as well as historical contexts and eventually broaden their social perspectives in a positive direction. In this course, the students will also familiarize themselves with the ideology of form and content and encounter specimens of narratives that both conform to and deviate from the received assumptions about discourses.
Course Instructor: Sreenath VS

This course aims to understand the generic ontology and ideological underpinnings of detective fiction through select stories. The major ideas that this course intends to discuss in the class include the concepts of justices, human right and ethics of retribution; the strong interconnection between the form of detective stories and the veracity of truth portrayed in these stories, and the problematics concerning the depiction of the society where the crime occurs.
Course Instructor: Sreenath VS

This course aims to provide the students with a comprehensive understanding of various notions governing the idea of subjectivity. The major questions that this course will be dealing with include ‘What is subjectivity?’ ‘How is subjectivity employed as a tool of resistance and subjugation?’ ‘What are the various ways an individual’s subjectivity is fashioned?’ and ‘How self-narratives give agency to individuals in the formation of their subjectivity?’
Course Instructor: Sreenath VS

This course aims to introduce students to these various streams of nationalist thoughts in India and the role they played in refashioning the ethos of Indian society. These ideas will be discussed in the class with the help of the iterary texts and critical materials.
Course Instructor: Sreenath VS

This is an advanced level specialized course which aims to engage with the multiple constructions of ‘women’ through history especially with the intention to enhance the concepts pertaining to gender and sexualities in the Indian context. The questions that this course deals with are: How is ‘woman’ conceptualized in India? What are the specific impacts/consequences of gender and sexuality in India? How has gender and sexuality evolved in India? What issues/frameworks become important in the articulations by Indian feminisms? This is an intensive reading-writing course that involves reading and analysis of theoretical texts along with written fiction, non-fiction and visual representations.
Course Instructor: Anandita Pan

Science fiction in India is an evolving genre. Despite its inception in the early twentieth century, Indian SF has remained largely ignored or absorbed within fantasy. One of the major tenets of Indian SF is its ability to combine traditional Indian imaginative literature with Western scientific ideas. Hence, this genre often sees an overflow of cognitive modes of Euro- American science fiction coupled with ancient traditions of myths and legends of the country such as fantasy, ghost stories, folk tales, fairy tales ,and mythological narratives. Science fiction in India, especially in the postcolonial era, is a creation of a society at once driven by a fast-growing materialistic industrial economy as well as the metaphysical and pastoral traditions that has existed for millennia. At the interstices, Indian SF, at its initial phase emerged as a ‘hybrid’—neither of this world nor another. This course will explore how science fiction provides the platform to explore the other, the non-conformity, the realistic non-reality, the humanised non-humans, with some specific situations provided uniquely through the Indian experience.
Course Instructor: Anandita Pan

This course aims to provide an introductory understanding of gender through literary texts in the way it is constructed by discourse and ideology. The primary goal of this course is to familiarize students with key issues, questions and debates pertaining gender, both historical and contemporary.
Course Instructor: Anandita Pan

Trajectories and experiences of nationhood in post-1947 India have often been shaped by experiences and episodes of conflict, in different parts of the country, and the subcontinent at large. These experiences of conflict, and consequent collective trauma, are intimately connected with constructions and articulations of collective identity and belonging in different communities across the country, revealing the extremely fraught and contested nature of the experience of nationhood in modern South Asia. These conflicts and contestations, political, territorial and cultural, sometimes crystallised in particular epochal moments signalling foundational shifts in national and cultural identity construction in South Asia like the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent, have shaped the history and national trajectory of India since independence. This course aims to look at a range of cultural texts spanning fiction, poetry, cinema, graphic novel, and memoir, which have emerged from different parts of the country that have experienced conflict and collective trauma, from post-Partition Punjab and Bengal, to various histories of conflict in the late twentieth and the current century, to examine how cultural products like literature and cinema negotiate conflict, violence, trauma and collective memory.
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee

This course aims to introduce students to a contemporary and topical area of interdisciplinary reflection and inquiry: the blue humanities. The domain of the blue humanities applies critical tools, such as those of literature, cultural studies and history to oceanic contexts. While these fields conventionally take the terrestrial as their point of departure, the blue humanities takes the ocean as its lens to undertake what may be called a marine (re)thinking of (human) life. It attempts to rethink the significance of the sea in human histories, and deliberate on and reevaluate the complex and multifarious relationship between the human and the ocean, past, present and future, in the multiple contexts of capital, commerce, war, empire, discovery, science, and literary and cultural imagination. The oceans cover more than two-third of the earth’s surface; they provide the largest habitat and source of oxygen, and begin and end the hydrologic cycle that regulates the earth’s climate. For centuries they have have been the site of global traffic and exchange of people, goods, cultures, languages.; and they have inspired adventure and awe, fear and promise down the ages. While traditionally research into the oceans has been limited to the domains of the natural sciences, the blue humanities uses approaches from the humanities and social sciences like those of history, anthropology, visual arts, media and literary studies to posit an ocean-centric understanding of the earth and its inhabitants, both human and non-human, displacing a terracentric view of the world
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee

This course will introduce students to a dynamic, emerging. area of interdisciplinary research called the Environmental Humanities, situated at the intersections of the humanities and social sciences, and the environmental and climate sciences. The Environmental Humanities engages with and rethinks contemporary environmental questions and challenges by using approaches and perspectives from the humanities like literature, history, film and media, cultural studies, politics, philosophy and the arts. It attempts to draw humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences, in order to develop well-rounded, holistic insights into significant environmental issues. The course aims to enable students to think critically about environmental challenges of contemporary significance such as climate change, global warming and biodiversity loss, using perspectives from the humanities, encouraging students to see why such humanistic approaches may be vital in understanding and confronting environmental concerns. Students will be encouraged to view issues of the environment in dialogue with social, political, economic and cultural contexts, and see how perspectives from literature, cultural studies, history and film among others, can open up new and productive ways of looking at environmental questions
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee.

This course will introduce students to a dynamic, emerging. area of interdisciplinary research called the Environmental Humanities, situated at the intersections of the humanities and social sciences, and the environmental and climate sciences. The Environmental Humanities engages with and rethinks contemporary environmental questions and challenges by using approaches and perspectives from the humanities like literature, history, film and media, cultural studies, politics, philosophy and the arts. It attempts to draw humanities disciplines into conversation with each other, and with the natural and social sciences, in order to develop well-rounded, holistic insights into significant environmental issues. The course aims to enable students to think critically about environmental challenges of contemporary significance such as climate change, global warming and biodiversity loss, using perspectives from the humanities, encouraging students to see why such humanistic approaches may be vital in understanding and confronting environmental concerns. Students will be encouraged to view issues of the environment in dialogue with social, political, economic and cultural contexts, and see how perspectives from literature, cultural studies, history and film among others, can open up new and productive ways of looking at environmental questions
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee.

This course will examine the work of some recent authors of the Indian diaspora in Britain and North America to uncover the changing historical, political, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts of migration from the Indian subcontinent, from the nineteenth century to the present day. The course aims to study, in relation to some contemporary Indian diasporic writing, the postcolonial thematics of diaspora literature, the relation between geography and form, between location and representation, and how these various factors determine the writing and reception of literature. After doing this course, students would have an understanding of issues of diaspora, location, history and geography in literature, and an awareness of the relationship between literary texts and their historical, political and cultural contexts. They will also gain an insight into the complex, traumatic and fragmented history of South Asia, which led to territorial, national and cultural reformulations, which in turn shaped modern South Asian cultural imaginaries of home, identity and belonging.
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee

This course is an advanced course which examines and deliberates upon ideas and questions of ‘disaster’ and ‘catastrophe’ in cultural representation in South Asia. South Asia has always been witness to disasters and calamitous events of great magnitude (natural, environmental, medical, industrial) throughout its history. In modern South Asian history, these catastrophes range from the various deadly epidemic outbreaks in colonial India like the plague of 1896-98, the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, regular outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera and small pox, natural disasters like devastating storms, cyclones, as well as man-made disasters like the Bengal Famine of 1943, and the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984. These calamitous events and disasters have increased and intensified in both frequency and enormity in the current century. The course aims to conceptualise and understand ‘disaster’ in South Asia, and examine its relationship with representation, memory, narrative, imagination and history, through reading a range of cultural texts from the subcontinent, which emerge from sites and histories of disaster. Through a focus on South Asia, the course aims to offer understandings of disaster and catastrophe, which displace Eurocentric notions and concepts. It aims to undertake an intersectional reading of disaster in South Asia, using lenses of postcolonialism and modernity, in conjunction and interrelation with central paradigms of South Asian modernity like colonialism, caste, religion and gender.
Course Instructor: Antara Chatterjee

Due to the acceleration of global movement's migration and border studies is an emergent field across disciplines in humanities and sciences. Connecting this to the literary cultures of the “subcontinent” through diverse readings, this course explores the dialogue between memory and history to uncover the role migration plays in altering spaces and practices in South Asia by transforming the experience of home and belonging within a nexus of health, materiality, social and cultural relationships.
Course Instructor: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee

The course explores ghosts, supernatural and adventure in children’s literature within larger social, scientific and cultural contexts through stories that entertain the young readers and educate them about the infinite possibilities and dangers lurking in the wider world. Beginning with questions such as ‘what/who are ghosts?’ or ‘why do adventures appeal to children?’ it unpacks the racial anxieties, trauma, fantasies, and the spectres of colonialism haunting the tales of horror and adventure.
Course Instructor: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee

The course interrogates the various modalities of memory and associated practices of memorialization in urban culture by evoking the ‘tradition and modernity debate’ in the context of colonial cities in India and their fraught transformations. It studies the ways in which the city negotiates with different memories of displacement propelled by devastating wars, disease, and natural calamities in its nuanced engagement with trauma and nostalgia, specifically through the lens of urban haunting.
Course Instructor: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee

The course explores the ideas of modernity and modernism through the lens of theatre and its relationship with other aesthetic/cultural movements. It engages with some of the canonical works in modern theatre across three continents to unfold a range of contexts in which the “modern” may be interpreted and debated. A study of these plays traces modern theatre’s negotiation with various kinds of spaces and bodies while addressing questions of identity, myth, memory, gender and affect.
Course Instructor: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee

This course looks at cities and the stories they tell through diverse windows leading to their past, present and future. It explores urban heritage not merely as a collection of “built structures”, but through people, their perceptions and lived experiences, their intersecting worlds, histories of movement and displacement, as well as the variegated cultural practices, food and friendship. The course incorporates through a diverse range of readings the aspects of the Indian urban culture that may be broadly classified into: the city and foodways, the ghost and the city, city and the migrants, rumours and the city/the city and the tall-tales, cities of the night/ night-walking and the city, the railway and the city, voices/noises in the city, the urban poor and the city underdogs, the waste and the city, cities and birds, the cities and the ghats, etc.
Course Instructor: Dr. Anuparna Mukherjee