The School of Languages and Literature/Humanities

The School pursues a rigorous, cutting-edge research into foundational questions that constitute the Humanities as a knowledge domain. The School is dedicated to reframing and rethinking the Humanities, interconnections between language, culture, and life in Asian and non-Asian contexts.
The School aims to equip the students with the ability to access rich resources in the language of their specialisation, to gain an appreciative and insightful understanding of the perspectives of the cultural context of the target language and provide translation/interpretation from a foreign language into English or Hindi with sophistication and sensitivity.
The School recognizes translation and interpretation as an important intellectual and creative activity and seeks to realize a national capability in these areas through innovative courses of studies. The School is interested in multi-disciplinary critical inquiry than in working within categorical boxes. That exploratory ethos guides the School and animates research interests, which are otherwise various, even heterogeneous, and which are constantly evolving.

Research and teaching at the School encompass the range of representational forms which find expression in prose, poetry, drama, performance, film, and the social and cultural fields within which such expressions take form and which they help to shape. Expertise in the department ranges in time, from the earliest written manuscripts to the most recent 21st century literature, and in universality, across several continents including literature from Asia, Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Australia.

The domains of faculty expertise includes Literary and Cultural Studies, World Literature, Indian Poetics, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities, Performance traditions from South and Southeast Asia.

Keeping in line with the ancient predecessor Nalanda Mahavihara, and the ethos of the University at large, the School seeks to cultivate and sustain an extremely diverse, cosmopolitan, and lively intellectual community.

Mission:

The School offers programmes with an aim to promote an understanding of texts and practices in their cultural/historical contexts and of the singular nature of diverse reflective and literary traditions.

Strategic Priorities:

• Innovative curriculum covering a wide range of literary traditions and emergent areas of research.
• Open for students from any streams passionate about literature and culture.
• Interdisciplinary orientation, with a wide range of specialized electives to choose from.
• World literature in focus: explores literary and cultural traditions across the world.
• Focus on the singular nature of diverse reflective and literary traditions.
• Defining intersections among literature, culture, theory, aesthetics and philosophy.
• A close engagement with the significant pre-modern and contemporary texts.

Programmes:

The School offers Master’s and PhD programmes in the field of World Literature.

Short-term Diploma and Certificate programmes are also offered in the following languages:

• English
• Korean
• Sanskrit
• Pali
• Tibetan