Research Studies

The School of Letters, Ambedkar University Delhi, offers a range of interdisciplinary courses and programmes in the literary humanities that support, encourage and redefine the meanings of literature, culture, language and humanisms in historical and contemporary perspectives. Tagore translated “Comparative Literature” into Bengali as “visva sahitya” or world literature. The choice of sahitya for literature reveals the possibilities of comparative studies of literature in our part of the world. Comparison is not just comparing disparate objects but nurturing a conceptual space in which the imagination can be confronted with otherness. The aim of the research programmes in CLTS in SOL is precisely to turn literature into an experience of that otherness, which both questions and redraws the sense of culture, nation and identity. While close-reading skills in the original will be a key aspect of the comparatist–translator’s brief, researchers in our integrated MPhil and PhD programmes may also choose to bring literary studies in close dialogue with other disciplines from the humanities and social sciences. The programme encourages the practice of translation and recognizes its significance in ways that will promote the reading and dissemination of literatures in as many languages as possible, with a focus on Indian and South Asian literary cultures. Currently supervision in the following research domains is available: theories of comparative literature, South Asian literary cultures (Bengali and Urdu), politics and aesthetics of translation, and minor literatures.