English

About the Department

---

About the Department

Since its establishment in the year 1877, the Department of English has been fostering critical thinking and motivating students to edify their disposition, with adherence to the vision of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. In pursuit of providing academic and scholastic ambience, the Department has always motivated debates, discussions, writings and research gathered in from the margins and have sheltered voices responding to the literary canons of the empire. Its academic achievement lies in nurturing the creativity and scholarly abilities of its students and preparing them to study overseas and find new and fruitful prospects.

The Department of English, one of the prestigious and historical departments of Aligarh Muslim University, was earlier affiliated to Calcutta University and for some time was associated with Allahabad University. Later, after the formal establishment of University Grants Commission in 1956, the department started coordinating with the statutory body. As the Article 30 of the Indian Constitution secures the right of minorities to establish and maintain educational institutions, the department has catered to the need of providing a better academic environment to students belonging to different walks of life, regions, nationalities and communities. It serves to more than a dozen departments of Arts and Social Sciences for subsidiary English paper and has a pan-university presence for its faculty members teaching compulsory English to not less than nine thousand students, ranging from Humanities and Commerce to Engineering.

The carefully structured syllabi of different courses running by the department focus not only on the development of communication skills of students but also include papers incorporating themes and topics ranging from New Literatures, Film Studies and Indian Aesthetics to Interdisciplinary studies, which also spreads over the idea of turning theory into practice. Under the aegis of Raleigh Literary Society, the teachers and students of the department has successfully enacted more than fifty plays. The literary society, named after Sir Walter Raleigh, the first English Professor at MAO College and the one who played a significant role in the development of English Studies at Oxford University, off and on organizes different literary activities like poetry recitation, performance poetry, essay writing and short story writing competition. Its faculty members have made notable contributions in the field of translation studies by guiding and contributing major and minor UGC research projects.