Overview
Anindita Banerjee studies the relationship between imagining and making the future in an expansive comparative framework across a range of contexts and periods. Within this broader 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, 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 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, Medium, and Meduza. She has appeared in the "Professor Spotlight" section of the Cornell Daily Sun.
In addition to peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in a wide range of disciplines, Banerjee's academic publications include several books and guest-edited special issues of flagship journals in Comparative Literature, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and Border and Migration Studies. Her 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. 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 journal 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. 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 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. 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 resource, 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.
She is currently an Ivy+Mellon Leadership Fellow and 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
