Sandeep Banerjee
Space, nature, and the environment; aesthetics and modernity; imperialism and decolonization; cultural politics of the Cold War; literary and social theory.
I am a scholar of Global Anglophone and World literature with a focus on the literary and cultural worlds of colonial and postcolonial South Asia. I also have scholarly expertise in British literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, and literary and social theory. I work with English, Bengali, and Hindi texts as well as photographs and films to understand human conceptions of space and nature, and how human culture and the natural environment shape one another. I also investigate the relationship between modernity and aesthetics in South Asia, especially in the contexts of imperialism, decolonization, the movements of global capitalism, and the Cold War.
I am the author of Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony (Routledge, 2019; pbk. 2020). It conceives of decolonization as a utopian spatial desire and underscores the centrality of space and representation in prefigurations of the postcolony. I am a co-editor of the anthology of essays Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh (Routledge, forthcoming). My articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Modern Asian Studies, and Utopian Studies besides anthologies such as the Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire and Space and Literary Studies. I am one of the series editors of the Routledge Series in the Cultures of the Global Cold War, and serve on the editorial boards of the journals positions: asia critique, and Mediations.
I am currently completing my second monograph, Heights of Fantasy: Imagining the Himalaya in the Colonial Capitalocene that examines changes in the cultural conceptions in the mountains between 1770 and 1950. Conceiving of this transformation as a contested process of placemaking in which both the British and Indians engaged in, the study illuminates a key moment in the colonial production of space and nature in the capitalocene. I am also translating a Bengali novel into English besides developing a project that will examine the impact of the cold war on literary and cultural texts as well as theory from South Asia.
Ph.D. (Syracuse University, USA)
M. Phil., (University of Oxford, UK)
M.A. (Jadavpur University, India)
B.A. Honours (Jadavpur University, India)
Books
Space, Utopia, and Indian Decolonization: Literary Pre-figurations of the Postcolony. (Routledge, 2019; Pbk, 2021)
Edited Volumes
Partition, Belonging and the Birth of Bangladesh (co-edited with Subho Basu). Routledge. Forthcoming.
Editor, “Of Deaths, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late-Victorian Holocausts.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 4 no. 1 (2025): 17-49.
Articles and Book Chapters
Refereed Journal Articles
“Re/Turning to Tagore in Our Times: Considerations on a Resource of Hope.” positions: asia critique. Forthcoming, 2026.
“Politics and Aesthetics in the Realm of Hunger.” In “Of Deaths, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late-Victorian Holocausts.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 1 (2025): 19-26.
“Introduction” to “Of Deaths, Disease, and Empire: A Forum on Mike Davis’s Late-Victorian Holocausts.” Global Nineteenth-Century Studies 4, no. 1 (2025): 17-18.
“Forms of Translation, Translation of Forms: From Maxim Gorky’s Mother to Mahasweta Devi’s Mother of 1084.” Comparative Literature Studies 61, no. 2 (2024): 306-34.
“World Literature, the Text, and the Critic: Re-reading The Country and the City, Re-situating Raymond Williams.” Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 20 (2022): 19-39.
“Cognitive Maps of the Semi-Periphery: Two Bengali Novels and the Transition to Colonial Capitalist Modernity.” Modern Fiction Studies 68, no. 1 (2022): 43-63.
“Gestures of Refusal: Utopian Longings in Satyajit Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.” Utopian Studies 30, no. 3 (2022): 257-73.
“Beyond the Intimations of Mortality: Chakrabarty, Anthropocene, and the Politics of the Im/Possible.” Mediations 30, no 2. (2017): 1-14.
“‘Why, This is (Not Quite) London!’: The Spectre of Kipling in Contemporary Kolkata.” Critical Imprints 3 (2015): 1-21.
“Secularising the Sacred, Imagining the Nation-Space: The Himalaya in Bengali Travelogues, 1856-1901.” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 3 (2015): 609-49. (With Subho Basu).
“‘Not altogether Unpicturesque’: Samuel Bourne and the Landscaping of the Victorian Himalaya.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42 (2014): 351-68.
Refereed Book Chapters
“The Imperial Romance: Colonialism in Ritual Form.” In Cambridge Companion to British Literature and Empire, ed. Auritro Majumder, 174-86. Cambridge UP, 2025.
“Empire, Nation, and the Question of Space.” In Space and Literary Studies, ed. Elizabeth Evans, 140-55. Cambridge UP, 2025. (Co-authored with Atreyee Majumder).
“The City as Nation: Delhi as the Indian Nation in Bengali bhadralok travelogues 1866-1910.” In Cities in South Asia, eds. Crispin Bates and Minoru Mio, 125-42. Routledge, 2015. (Co-authored with Subho Basu).
“A Brief History of South Asia.” In South Asia in the World: An Introduction, ed. Susan S. Wadley, 22-65. ME Sharpe, 2015. (Co-authored with Subho Basu et al).
“Raymond Williams: Materialist Approach to Culture, Literature, Media and Politics.” In Modern Social Thinkers, ed. Pradip Basu, 319-36. Setu Prakashani, 2012.
Refereed Reference Essays
“Utopia and South Asian Postcolonial Fiction.” In Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, ed. Deidre Lynch. Oxford UP, 2025.
“British Colonialism and Imperialism.” In Oxford Bibliographies: Hinduism, ed. Tracy Coleman. Oxford UP, 2023. Introduction, notes, and 115 annotated entries. 11,149 words. (Co-authored with Atreyee Majumder).
Translations
“‘Whether Flowers Bloom or Not’: Selections from Bengali Poetry.” Harf: A Journal of South Asian Studies 3 (2018): 41-45.
Public Scholarship and Reviews
Public Engagements
Panelist, “CBC Ideas: How this 19th-century Indian feminist flipped the colonial travelogue on its head.” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada. Aired: 10 September 2025.
Invited Public Lecture: “Singing in Dark Times.” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Crow’s Theater, Toronto, Canada. 7 January 2024. Aired on CBC Ideas: 22 February 2024.
Panelist, “CBC Ideas: Muhammad Iqbal – One of the Greatest South Asian Thinkers of the 20th Century,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada. Aired: 25 January 2023.
Panelist, “CBC Ideas: The Year 1913 – The World on the Brink,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Stratford, Canada. 24 July 2022. Aired: 3 November 2022.
Conversation with Prof. Sumathi Ramaswamy, Professor of History, Duke University. Bangalore International Center, Bangalore, India. 16 October 2020. On Zoom.
Public Scholarship
“স্বপ্ন হলেও সত্যি: অসম্ভবের রাজনীতি প্রসঙ্গে” [“A Truthful Dream: On the Politics of the Impossible”]. Bangla Journal 27 (2022): 64-72. In Bengali.
“To Dream, Perchance to Change.” Café Dissensus. Issue 61 (2022).
“Utopianism and its Discontents.” Marx, Asia, and the history of the present. episteme. Issue 3 (2020).
“Epiphany and Exasperation: The National Library.” In Kolkata, Book City: Readings, Fragments, Images, eds. Jennie Renton and Sria Chatterjee, 163-72. Textualities, 2009.
Book Reviews & Roundtables
Review of States of Disconnect: The China-India Literary Relation in the Twentieth Century by Adhira Mangalagiri. Columbia UP, 2023. Comparative Literature Studies 61, no. 4 (2024): 709-11.
“Requiem for a Dream.” Forum on Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery by Auritro Majumder. Cambridge UP, 2020. Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 9, no. 3 (2022): 399-404.
“A Saga of Conceptual Difficulties.” Review of Similarity: A Paradigm for Culture Theory, eds. Anil Bhatti and Dorothee Kimmich. Tulika Books, 2018. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. LVI, nos. 45 & 46 (2021): 34-36.
Review of Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures by Aamir Mufti. Harvard UP, 2018. Ariel 51, no. 1 (2020): 170-73.
“Anatomy of a Criticism: Considerations on a ‘More than Global’ Reading Strategy.” In “More than Global?”: A Roundtable Discussion on Thinking Literature Across Continents by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller. Duke UP, 2016. New Global Studies 13, no.1 (2019): 131-36.
Review of Daniel E. White, From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print & Modernity in Early British India 1793-1835. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. University of Toronto Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2015): 214-16.
Major Grants
- Insight Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada (2019-24).
- Research Grant, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Germany (2018-20; Co-PI)
- Établissement de nouveaux professeurs-chercheurs Grant, Fonds de recherche du Québec (2015-18).
Awards
- Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching. Department of English Student Association, McGill University, 2017.
Fellowships
- Faculty Fellowship. Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, McGill University (2016-18).
- Dissertation Fellowship. Humanities Centre, Syracuse University, USA (2012-13).
- University Fellowship. Syracuse University, USA (2011-12; 2007-08).
- British Chevening/ Radhakrishnan Oxford Scholarship (2000-02).
I supervise projects related to my areas of interest.
Syracuse University