English Department

Established in 1912, the Department of English is as old as the College. It was the first to begin the Honours course in 1927, and also the first department in the College to introduce the Post-Graduate Course in 2016. The committed faculty members offer a curriculum that, in addition to following the syllabus prescribed by the University of Calcutta, requires students to read and reflect on several books in addition to the prescribed texts, and to be acquainted with critical theories, literary trends, cultural movements and contemporary media.

This department offers the Honours and Elective English courses as well as the AECC course for the first year students. In under graduate Honours classes, the student teacher ratio is about 50:1, while in the post graduate classes, it is 25:1.

Faculty members are actively involved in research, presenting papers in national and international seminars and publishing in several books and journals. English is the only department in Loreot College to publish an annual peer reviewed departmental journal, Critical Imprints (ISSN 2319-4774). Eight volumes have been published so far and each volume carries at least one student paper. Students’ creativity is also encouraged through the Poetry Forum, which publishes anthologies of poems.

Every academic year, guest speakers from India and abroad are invited to address students, offering valuable exposure to different cultural contexts. In the year 2018-19, Professor Shormishtha Panja delivered the first Annual Ratna Chatterjee Memorial Lecture. The faculty is actively engaged in collaborating with professors of other colleges, and to this end organised a workshop in 2018 on the new CBCS system that was attended by participants from over fifty colleges. The department also collaborated with Bhawanipore Education Society and Lady Brabourne Colleges to organise webinars in 2020.

There are a number of endowment prizes to motivate students:
The Madhumita Mitra Memorial Prize
The Sarojini Dutta Prize
The JayCee Prize for Love of Literature
The Pulin Chandra Prize
The Bibhash Bhattarcharya Prize
The Kajal Sen Gupta Prize

Many students of English Honours opt for the Masters Course in English in reputed national and international institutions. Several students also opt for other fields like social development, publishing, journalism and media. The department has a long list of academics as well as established authors to its credit. In keeping with the evolving career trends, the college also facilitates specialised courses on editing and publishing, a major thriving industry today. Social welfare and development, journalism and media (print as well as electronic) are other fields that absorb students of the department. There is also an increasing demand in the corporate sector for technical writers and language experts and a number of our English graduates are hired by companies such as TCS, Cognizant, IBM and so on. Other fields like business administration, banking, law, advertising, public relations, tourism and hospitality, academic counselling are also available to the students of English.

Department: Faculty

Dr. Ms. Sukanya Dasgupta

Qualifications: M.A., Ph.D., UGC NET

Sukanya Dasgupta is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English, Loreto College. Her areas of interest include Early Modern Poetry and Drama, Elizabethan and Stuart historiography, Renaissance art and iconography and Early Modern Women’s Writing.

Her publications include “Ovid Revisited: Locating the Heroides in Michael Drayton and Madhusudan Dutt “ (Otherness: Essays and Studies, Volume 8, Number 3, Aarhus, Denmark, 2021);‘“Confused Anarchy and the late civil broils”: The Politics of Genre in Milton’s Histories’ (Prague Journal of English Studies, Volume 9, No. 1, 2020) ; ‘All out of an empty coffer’: Gift-giving, Credit and Representation in Timon of Athens” in Shakespeare and Money, ed. Carla Dente and John Drakakis, (Pisa University Press, 2018); “Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles” (The Seventeenth Century, Vol XXXIII, No. 4, Oct 2018); ’ "Then Nothing be my Speech": Identity and its Discontents in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure’ (Critical Imprints, Vol VI, 2018); ’"This Hidden Knowledge Have I Learned of Thee" : Anne Vaughan Locke and the ’Invisible Church’" in "Anthropological Reformations" ed. Anne Eusterschulte and Hannah Walzholz (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Gottingen, 2015); “‘Of polish’d pillars, or a roofe of gold’: Authority and Affluence in the English Country-House Poem” in Contested Spaces of Nobility in Early Modern Europe, (Ashgate, 2011); "Silent Parables: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Court Culture" (Critical Imprints, Vol I, 2012);“Drayton’s ‘Silent Spring’: Poly-Olbion and the Politics of Landscape”(The Cambridge Quarterly, June 2010).

She has edited Aspects of Modernity: American Women’s Poetry (Jadavpur University Press, Kolkata, 2014), co-edited The Word and the World, (Loreto College and Earthcare Books, Kolkata, 2009) and is the editor of Critical Imprints Vol V (2017).

She has received travel grants from the UGC and the ICSSR to present papers at international conferences at the University of Colorado, USA, the Centre for Visual Arts and Research in Nicosia, Cyprus, the University of Pisa, Italy and Freie University, Berlin. She was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Grants-in-Aid (2001) for pre-doctoral research in the UK and she was also awarded the Charles Wallace Trust Visiting Fellowship (2014-2015) at CRASSH (Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), University of Cambridge, UK, with a Joint Visiting Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

Mrs. Mangala Gouri Chakraborty

Qualifications: M.A.,PGCTE

Ms Mangala Gauri Chakraborty is Associate Professor of English at Loreto College, Kolkata. Her interests range from Linguistics to Bilingualism, ELT, Self-Access Learning, Writing skills and Distance Education. A scholarship from the USIS enabled her to complete an online teacher training course on Critical Thinking (2009) offered by the University of Oregon. She was a recipient of a Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship that enabled her to represent India (Eastern Zone) at the Conference Firing the Canon (2001) organised by the British Council at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and presented a paper on John Osborne. She was an observer in a Hornby project (2006) on developing communication skills in English in South 24 Parganas, West Bengal and she was involved in programmes for non-formal adult education at Nimpith Village, South 24 Parganas (2004-2007). She Was a resource person in a course - Language and Communication Skills in English for tribal school children at Jhargram in 2014. Her publications are ’Judith as Hero’ in The Word and the World (2009) which she has co-edited with Sukanya Dasgupta;. She was the editor of Critical Imprints Volume IV and is at present editing volume IX. She is passionately interested in Opera and writes poetry.

Dr. Mrs. Sumita Banerjee

Qualifications: M.A., B.Ed.,Ph.D.

Sumita Banerjee is currently Head of the Department of English at Loreto College, Kolkata. Her areas of special interest are Ecocriticism, the Supernatural in Literature and Creative Writing. She has published on a range of topics like the Psalms, the writings of St.Francis, Guru Nanak, Shakespeare, John Clare, Amitav Ghosh, Mahesh Dattani , Bankimchandra, Tagore, Thomas Mann, Baudelaire and Proust. She has edited volumes II and VIII of Critical Imprints. She writes poetry in both English and Bengali. Her collection of Bengali poems is titled ’Tomar Amar Deen’. She has coordinated the student publication ’Twisted Forevers : Old Tales Made New’. An ardent Green Crusader, she is involved in spreading literacy and cultural awareness in the Sunderbans, and coordinates with the NGO Goonj in its relief missions. She rescues injured animals found in the college campus and her locality.

Dr Sanghita Sanyal

Qualifications: M.A., B.Ed., M.Phil., PhD.

Sanghita Sanyal has graduated in English Literature, from Presidency College, thereafter completing her Masters and M.Phil from University of Calcutta. She also acquired her B.Ed. degree from Loreto College. She acquired her Ph.D. from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (Kolkata) on
Reading the Songs of Rabindranath Tagore: Gender, Text and Performance.

Her academic areas of interest include Gender Studies, Tagore Studies, Translations, Culture Studies, Linguistics and ELT.

Sanghita has several articles in various journals and books. Her publications are on Victorian Women sonneteers, Narrative in Coleridge’s "Christabel", Psycho-biographical elements in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Gendered narratives in Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories, Reading the Songs of Solidarity of Rabindranath Tagore et. all. She has a monograph, "A Mind Beyond Fear: A Comparative Study of the Women in the Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore and Virginia Woolf" and also a collection of translated stories: "Soulful Tales: A collection of Six Short Stories of Rabindranath Tagore", co-authored with Kuntala Sengupta. Sanghita writes both in English and Bengali.

Dr. Subhasree Basu

Qualifications: M.A, Ph.D

Subhasree Basu is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Loreto College. She earned her doctoral degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2017 for her thesis "’Of Beauty and Riotous Pleasure’: Popular American Cultural Expression and the Short Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald".

Her areas of interest include Modern American Literature, Caribbean and Australian Literature, Short Story, literature of the Romantic Period and Partition Narratives. Her recent publications include ’Henry James The Ambassadors’ in The American Novel from Hawthorne to Heller: Cultural Contexts and Critical Perspectives (Macmillan, 2020), ‘Dissenting Voices in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Poetry’ in Aspects of Modernity: American Women’s Poetry (Kolkata, 2014). She has also edited the VIIth volume of Critical Imprints, the peer-reviewed annual journal of the Department of English, Loreto College.

She has presented papers at a number of national and international conferences and was nominated for the U.S State Department of Education’s International Visitor’s Leadership Programme titled ‘Developing American Studies Curricula’ in 2011 and visited several universities in the USA as part of the programme. She was also selected for an international workshop on South Asian Cultural Studies at Institute of Advanced Communication and Research, Kathmandu, Nepal in April 2013. She was awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral and Professional Research Fellowship 2013-14 for her doctoral research and took classes in the graduate and post graduate sections in the department of American and English Literature, Rutgers, New Jersey during her stay in the U.S. She is a core member of South Asian Foundation for Academic Research (SAFAR), a forum of researchers and scholars from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka committed to the study of South Asia. She received the Federal Assistance Award from the U.S. Embassy in 2021 for her project, ’A Place for ‘U.S.’: Tales from a New Nation’ and successfully completed it in March 2023. She is part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) network, ‘Addressing the Histories and Legacies of Empire in Literary House Museums: Dove Cottage and Beyond’.
She has been working as a volunteer teacher at Vivek Vani, a free evening school for inner city working class children from underprivileged backgrounds since 2008.

Ms. Sulagna Chattopadhyay

Qualifications: M.A., M.Phil

Sulagna Chattopadhyay is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Loreto College. She received her BA degree in English from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, followed by her MA and MPhil degrees from Jadavpur University. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of English, Jadavpur University.

Her areas of academic interest include utopian studies, science fiction, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, women’s writing, gender studies, and the environmental humanities. Her article entitled “Re-evaluating the ‘Critical Dystopia’: Individualism and Communitarianism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Matter of Seggri’” was published in Jadavpur University Essays and Studies, Volume 32.