Overview
Anindita Banerjee studies the relationship between imagining and making futures across a range of periods and contexts. Within this broader pursuit, her research and teaching focus on the evolving interfaces between science, technology, and culture; natural and built environments; media and information systems; and the migration of people, things, ideas, and images. Spanning Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas, her work pays particular attention to networks of exchange, innovation, production, and consumption that emerge and shape the future from outside the conventional coordinates along which we imagine and talk about the modern world. Her scholarship has been featured in numerous media outlets, including BBC Culture, Radio Free Europe, Medium, and Meduza.
Her academic publications include a number of books and special issues of flagship journals in Comparative Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, and Border and Migration Studies. Banerjee's first book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize, and was praised in Science magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Higher Education, Comparative Literature Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Slavic Review, and Isis among many academic and public venues in North America, Europe, and Asia.
She has edited and co-edited five other books: Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2026); Border Environments (forthcoming from Cornell in 2026); South of the Future: Marketing Care and Speculating Life in South Asia and the Americas (SUNY 2020); Science Fiction Circuits of the South and East (Oxford Peter Lang 2018); and Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (ASP 2018). She has co-edited the following special issues: "Socialist Anti-Racisms: Connected Histories and Contested Legacies" (2023) in Comparative Literature Journal; "Border Environments" (2021) in Latin American Literary Review; "Thinking through the Pandemic" (2020) in Science Fiction Studies; "Working Towards Equity" (2020) in the Slavic and East European Journal; "Geopoetics" (2016) in Slavic Review; and "World Revolution" (2017) in Slavic and East European Journal. In addition, she is a founding co-editor of the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction at Palgrave Macmillan, and a former co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television at Liverpool University Press.
At Cornell, Banerjee served on the task force that established the Environment and Sustainability Program, an undergraduate major that spans the Colleges of Arts and Sciences and Agriculture and Life Sciences. She built the new environmental humanities concentration in the major and chaired it for the first four years. A recent snapshot of her teaching, research, and interdisciplinary collaborations between sciences and arts of the environment can be found at Nabokov, Naturally, an Arts Unplugged event held on March 15, 2024, followed by the Cornell Libraries' creation of an open-access digital exhibit, Vladimir Nabokov: Lepidopterist.
Banerjee has been a faculty fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability since its inception, receiving an Academic Venture Fund grant as well as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship there. She also served as a member of the Atkinson Center's Faculty Advisory Board for several years. She is a participating member of cross-college programs in Biology and Society, Media Studies, and Visual Studies, and serves on the steering committee of the South Asia Program.
In 2024-25, as an Ivy+Mellon Leadership Fellow, she served as a Special Assistant to the Dean of the Cornell School of Continuing Education.
Research Focus
Science, Technology, Environment, Migration
In the news
- Engaged Opportunity Grants connect students with hands-on community projects
- Nabokov celebrated for crossing arts/science boundaries
- Events celebrate Nabokov as butterfly scientist
- Class explores Nabokov as writer and ‘butterfly man’
- Banerjee named Mellon Fellow in diversity network
- Author Jemisin builds ‘the world from scratch’
- How are N. K. Jemisin’s novels acts of political resistance?
- Cornell, global partners discuss the next ‘grand challenge’
- What to read in 2022? A&S faculty weigh in
- South Asia, Latin America ‘flashpoints’ of global care markets
- Migrations initiative announces cross-campus awards
- Spring event allows students to explore new Environmental & Sustainability Sciences major
- Book presents alternative cultural history of science fiction
- Cross-college Program in Environment and Sustainability launches
- Students imagine future without fossil fuels
- Cornell holds its first undergraduate psychology conference
- Podcast explores science fiction and the human future
- Imagining the Future
- New edited volume examines Russian science fiction
- Environmental Humanities Lecture Series begins Oct. 4
- Ponder a fossil fuel-free world, then think art
- International collaboration results in play about borders
- Humanists offer critical perspective on climate change
- Anindita Banerjee kickstarts Russian sci-fi
