Overview
Anindita Banerjee’s research focuses on science fiction and technocultural studies, environmental studies, media studies, and migration studies across Russia, Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Latin and African Americas. Working at the interfaces of science, technology, arts, and the environment, she is particularly interested in networks of exchange, innovation, production, and consumption that develop outside conventional coordinates along which we imagine and talk about the modern world.
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. After serving on the committee that established the Environment and Sustainability Program, a new undergraduate major that spans the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, she became the first chair of the environmental humanities concentration in the major. In addition, she serves as a steering committee member of the South Asia Program and a participating member of cross-college programs in Biology and Society, Media Studies, and Visual Studies. A recent snapshot of her teaching, research, and interdisciplinary collaborations can be found at Nabokov, Naturally, an Arts Unplugged event held on March 15, 2024.
In 2023-25, Banerjee is an Ivy+Mellon Leadership Fellow and a co-chair of the task force for the Global Grand Challenge theme "The Future."
Banerjee has authored and edited a number of books and special issues of flagship journals in the fields of Comparative Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Slavic and Eurasian 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, 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 UP 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 (Peter Lang 2018); and Russian Science Fiction Literature and Cinema: A Critical Reader (ASP 2018). Special issues of flagship journals she has co-edited include "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