Anindita Banerjee

Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences, with cross-appointments in the Environment & Sustainability Program, History of Art and Visual Studies, Literatures in English, and Romance Studies. She serves as SAP Core Faculty for the South Asia Program and has been instrumental in establishing Cornell's Environmental and Sustainability Program, where she built and chaired the environmental humanities concentration for four years.

Her research explores the relationship between imagining and making futures across diverse contexts, focusing 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 examines networks of exchange, innovation, production, and consumption that emerge outside conventional coordinates of the modern world.

Her scholarship has been featured in BBC Culture, Radio Free Europe, Medium, and Meduza. She has authored multiple books including the award-winning We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (2013), which won the Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize, and is currently working on Reactionary Worldbuilding (MIT Press, 2026) and Border Environments (Cornell, 2026). Her research demonstrates consistent engagement with science fiction as a critical lens for examining global environmental, technological, and social transformations.

• Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies book prize
• Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellow (2024-25)
• Academic Venture Fund grant from Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability
• Social Sciences and Humanities Research Fellowship

Banerjee serves as a faculty fellow of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and is a participating member of cross-college programs in Biology and Society, Media Studies, and Visual Studies. She co-led a workshop series and engaged-learning course on border spaces and environmental justice supported by a grant from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. As an Ivy+ Mellon Leadership Fellow, she serves as Special Assistant to the Dean of the Cornell School of Continuing Education, focusing on academic leadership and governance with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.