ENH faculty member, Dr. Asifa Sultana, has been promoted to Associate Professor with effect from 1 July 2019. She joined the Department as a Lecturer in July 2008.
Anika Saba has been promoted to Lecturer III of English and Humanities at BRAC University as of 1 July 2019.
https://www.bracu.ac.bd/about/people/anika-saba
ENH faculty member Dr. Asifa Sultana joins a team of language researchers for a Europe-based study on children's language development. The six-year project brings together child language data from 50 languages around the world to investigate the relationship between language and thought. The study adopts the view that human languages are shaped by their thoughts which contests a dominant proposal that language determines our thoughts. A large team of language researchers collaborate to create a crosslinguistic perspective that is essential in determining the nature of this relationship. The team of researchers brings in linguistic expertise in a range of areas, e.g. morphology, semantics, syntax, acquisition theories that promise to shape a comprehensive understanding of the relationship it proposes to study. Dr. Sultana, as a researcher of child language, is to provide Bangla data to this crosslinguistic set-up, and examine the nature of the language-thought relationship in Bangla. Because research on Bangla acquisition is scarce, a project of this scale is considered a milestone for Bangla. The ten-million-euro project is supported by the Synergy Grant 2019 of the European Research Council. The project is hosted in The Centers for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Berlin, and the University of Milan-Bicocca, Milan. The research will formally begin in 2020.
Ms. Lubaba Sanjana and Dr. Asifa Sultana, published a paper in the Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development. The paper, titled “Productivity of Verb Stems and Inflections in Bangla-Speaking Children,” explores Bangla verb morphological elements with regard to how productively children use them. The paper reports findings resulting from spontaneous language samples of 30 Bangla-speaking children between ages 2 and 4.
Nadeem Zaman, author of In the Time of the Others, gave a talk in the GDLN Conference room on 6 Nov 2019 at 3.30 pm. Zaman is a Bangladeshi author who lives and teaches in the United States. He is a fiction writer and his short stories have been published in the US, Hong Kong, India and Bangladesh. His first novel, In the Time of the Others, has been long-listed for 2019 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Zaman has taught at ENH as a Visiting Faculty in Summer 2018 and some of his former students attended the talk. Anika Saba, Lecturer, ENH, introduced the author, and other faculty members engaged in conversation and discussion with him regarding his book and the process of writing and publishing. Professor and Chairperson, Firdous Azim, closed the ceremony with a thank you note.
Dr. Subhoranjan Dasgupta, former professor of Human Sciences at the Institute of Development Studies presented his paper, Partition of 1947: The Trauma and the Triumph. Professor Subhoranjan Dasgupta studied at Presidency College (Kolkata), Calcutta University and University of Heidelberg. He attained his PhD from the University of Heidelberg. His two areas of specialization are the Partitition of 1947 and Neo-Marxian aesthetics. He has also acquired expertise on the creativity of Gunter Grass and Akhtaruzzaman Elias. His major publications are: Bishnu Dey’s Poetry in the light of Neo-Marxian Aesthetics, The Trauma and the Triumph-Gender and Partition in the East (two volumes), Elegy and Dream- An Evolution of the Creative Commitment of Akhtaruzzaman Elias and The Tin Drummer’s Odyssey- A Monograph on Gunter Grass. While most commentators on the Partition of Bengal in 1947 have focused on the trauma experienced by the displaced men and women and the refugees, in this paper, Professor Dasgupta emphasizes this memorable dimension of triumph experienced by the refugee-women who, in fact, changed the physiognomy of Kolkata’s working world. What also deserves mention is that demure and withdrawn women of West Bengal followed their counterparts and stepped out of their homes to become working women as well. The talk was well-attended, and followed by an engaging question and answer session.
The Urban Novel went on a study trip “Walking in the City on 21 Nov 2019 as a part of their class project. The class met at Gulshan 1 circle and walked down Gulshan Avenue to look and observe the new architectural designs of Dhaka’s urban development. They had to distinguish between classical, modern and postmodern architecture. After their tour, they had to write a short report of 300 words through the LMS (Moodle) and it became part of their Quiz-3. The project was inspired from one of the novels they were studying in the course, High-Rise by J.G .Ballard.
On the 11th of November 2019, the English and Humanities Department’s very own bilingual creative writing production, Resonance, conducted a writing workshop titled “Café Compose” which was open to all students from various departments of the university. The workshop was divided into three sessions – poetry, followed by bilingual fiction and then Bengali non-fiction. The first session on English poetry was conducted by Seema Nusrat Amin, a lecturer of BRAC University. After a brief discussion on refining one’s senses, writing with a prompt and working with sound, the participants were given a second prompt – to incorporate the given phrase from a poem into their work. The session then continued with discussions on playing with words and lines, using periods and punctuation or discarding them, visual and auditory poems, paying attention to speed and the effect it creates. By the end of the session, the participants produced some great original poems which they recited to the audience. The next session on bilingual fiction was led by yet another lecturer from the Department of English and Humanities, Mohammad Mahmudul Haque. He conducted a very engaging discussion with the audience, presenting the different ways in which prose could be written. He started the session by asking students about their favourite works of literature and why it was memorable to them. He then discussed the topics of visual disposition and external details within written texts that entice the readers to indulge in literary novels. The session ended with the participants reading out what they produced, followed by constructive feedback by the lecturer. In the third segment of the workshop which focused on Bengali non-fiction, we were graced by the presence of the renowned journalist and author, Shahnaz Munni. She began the session with a few personal stories from when she just started writing non-fiction for newspapers, and spoke about how truth is more important than imagination. Important requirements of report writing were discussed, such as information from real incidents, interviews and innovative ideas, but most importantly the need for an objective. Other than report writing, she also enlightened the participants on how to properly write features in newspapers. The workshop concluded with a task to write a small paragraph titled “Life of Eternal Humiliation.” The session ended with a speech from the chair and a Call for Submissions announced by the Resonance team.
Students of ENG 114: Introduction to English Drama presented impressive performances of selected scenes from Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex and Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, Dr.Faustus. These performances at the end of the semester, give students a chance to demonstrate their knowledge of the theoretical as well as practical aspects of drama and stagecraft.