The Department conducts a theme course each year for MA and MPhil students. As a part of this course, an international conference is held in March. The conference, which has become a regular feature since 1996, takes place over three days and draws a large international participation. Conferences held so far:

• Contemporary European Images of India (1996)
• The Nation and Myth (1997)
• Literature and Exile (1997)
• The Romantic Response to Modernity (1999)
• Fin-de-Siècle: The Twentieth Century in Retrospect (2000)
• Literature and Anthropology (2001)
• Culture and Globalisation (2002)
• Literature and Industry: From the Printed Text to the Hypertext (2003)
• The Writer’s Craft: From World Wars to Gulf Wars (2004)
• Fact and Fiction. Autobiography after the Death of the Author (2005)
• Rites of Passage: Exploring changes in the travel motif (2006)
• The Contentious Question of Culture(s) in Contemporary Societies (2007)
• Empire and Rebellion: postcolonial perspectives (2008)
• Imagined Horizons: Spatial Configurations of the Present (2009)
• Improbable plots? Making sense of contemporary popular fiction (2010)
• New Experiments in Contemporary Literature (2017)
• Imaginary Homelands (2018)
• Of Remembering and Forgetting: Perspectives on History and Memory (2019)
• Unravelling Lives: Literary Encounters and Life-Writing (2020)
• No Place to Go? Perspectives on Displacement, Belonging and Non-Belonging (2021)
• Conflict and Literature - Narratives of Struggle (2022)
• Islands in Literature, Literary Islands, Island Literature (2023)
• Bodies that matter: Deconstructing Corporeality (2024)

An annual student seminar is also organized at the end of the academic year, in which MA and MPhil students make presentations on the theme.