ENH hosts guest lectures

The Department of English and Humanities (ENH), Brac University hosted two guest lecturers in December 2022. The first lecture titled “Commitment to peace and not War in the Paradise Lost, Iliad and Mahabharata” by Professor Subhoranjan Dasgupta, Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. was held on, December 12, 2022. The talk elaborated on the inexorable quest of peace in the heroic epics by closely analyzing and deconstructing the texts of Iliad and Mahabharata.

A short bio of the presenter is given below:

          Subhoranjan Dasgupta is a Former Professor of Human Sciences at the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata. Professor Dasgupta’s book on Akhtaruzzaman Elias was published by University Press Limited, Dhaka, making him one of the first critics to introduce the novelist to readers in English. After receiving his Master's degree, he joined the Ananda Bazar Patrika as a journalist. In 1975, he went to Cologne (Germany) to work as Editor for the Voice of Germany and thereafter he lived and worked for six years in Heidelberg, Germany's famous university town, as a Research Fellow. He obtained his Ph.D from the University of Heidelberg. His areas of interest and research are Marxian and Neo-Marxian aesthetics, sociology of literature and Partition of Bengal. His major publications are Dialectics and Dreams, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India (with Jasodhora Bagchi) and Dialogues with Four Nobel Laureates. A leading critic and analyst of culture and politics, he has written extensively on Bishnu Dey, Jibanananda Das, Manik Bandopadhyay, Bertolt Brecht, Günter Grass, Syed Waliullah and of course Akhtaruzzaman Elias.

Professor Subhoranjan Dasgupta delivering his speech

The second guest lecture was delivered by Dr. Ahmed Shamim, the Department of Asian Studies at University of Texas at Austin, on 19^th December 2022. The lecture was titled Bangla Affinities of Koda, an Endangered Munda Language where the speaker compared phonological and morphological evidence of early contact between Kɔɖa and neighboring Indo-Aryan languages, especially Bangla. A short bio of the speaker is provided below.

Dr. Ahmed Shamim is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Studies at UT-Austin who has been teaching Bangla at UT since 2015. He also taught Linguistics and Modern Bangla Literature at CUNY LaGuardia Community College and Bangla Language at SASLI, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the City University of New York. He penned two books on Bangla language, literature, and linguistics: Bangla Kotha (2013) and Shobdo Hoy Shobder Ghore (2018). His research interests include Endangered Language Documentation and Description, Phonology, Morphology, Grammar, and Language Policies and Ideologies. He is currently working on a description of the syntax of Koda, an endangered Munda language in Bangladesh.

Dr. Ahmed Shamim with the audience

Dr. Ahmed Shamim