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. Working in seven languages and spanning Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Americas, her projects, publications, and pedagogy 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, Medium, and Meduza.
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 major 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 English and Romance Studies, as well as in Agriculture and Life Sciences in Landscape Architecture and DNRE. 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 cross-college programs in Biology and Society, Media Studies, and Visual Studies.
As an Ivy+Mellon Leadership Fellow, she served as a Special Assistant to the Dean of the Cornell School of Continuing Education in 2024-25.
In addition to many 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 single-authored 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. Her second monograph, titled The Chernobyl Effect, is under review for publication.
Banerjee has edited and co-edited five other peer-reviewed books and six special issues of flagship journals in interdisciplinary humanistic fields: 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); Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (ASP 2018); "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.
Banerjee 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.
Research Focus
Science, Technology, Environment, Migration
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