Anindita Banerjee

Overview

Anindita Banerjee studies the relationship between imagining and making the future across a range of contexts and periods. Within this broad inquiry, 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, beings, ideas, and images. Working in seven languages and spanning three continents, her publications, pedagogy, and public engagement pay 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 scholarly work has been featured in media outlets in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia, including Science magazine, BBC Culture, Radio Free Europe, The Times Literary Supplement, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Times Higher Education, The Shanghai Literary Review, the New Books Network, Medium, and Meduza. 

Banerjee's first book, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Wesleyan 2013), won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize. She has since edited and co-edited five other peer-reviewed books: Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice (MIT 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). 

In addition to publishing numerous articles in flagship journals of several fields, Banerjee has guest-edited and 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. 

A founder of the book series Studies in Global Science Fiction at Palgrave Macmillan, Banerjee also served as a member of the editorial collective of the journal Science Fiction Film and Television at Liverpool University Press. 

At Cornell, Banerjee played a key role in establishing the cross-college Environment and Sustainability Program, an undergraduate major launched in 2018 that currently enrolls over 60 students in the College of Arts and Sciences and several hundred in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She built the new environmental humanities concentration in the major and chaired it for the first four years. Her contributions to the new program were featured in the "Professor Spotlight" section of the Cornell Daily Sun.

Banerjee has advised graduate and undergraduate theses in Arts and Sciences, in the departments of Comparative Literature, Literatures in English, and Romance Studies, and in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, in Landscape Architecture and Natural Resources and the Environment. 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 series of events held on March 15, 2024. The events added a rich literary and artistic dimension to exhibits of Nabokov's own butterfly specimens from the Cornell University Insect Collection and books from the Mann Library's special collection that attest to the celebrated writer's lifelong study of lepidoptera. These events were followed by Mann Library's creation of a virtual open-access 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 the cross-college programs and centers Biology and Society, Media Studies, the Migration Institute, and Visual Studies.

As an Ivy+Mellon Leadership Fellow in 2023-25, she served as a Special Assistant Dean for Program Building and Curricular Development at the Cornell School of Continuing Education.

Research Focus

Science, Technology, Environment, Migration