Loreto College

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.