Sandeep Banerjee

I am a scholar of postcolonial, global Anglophone, and world literature, and of literary and cultural theory, with a focus on South Asia. I work across English, Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit texts and across genres from poetry to the novel and the travelogue, as well as with photographs and films. My research investigates how imperialism, decolonization, and global capitalism shape ecological, aesthetic, and political imaginaries, and how literary form registers those pressures.

This work spans three broad areas. In the environmental humanities, I examine how colonial and capitalist placemaking make and remake South Asian landscapes, and how culture and environment constitute one another. In literary form and aesthetics, I study the ideology and historicity of forms ranging from the imperial romance to the modern Bengali lyric and novel, and how those forms respond to the dynamics of colonial and postcolonial modernity. And in culture and the political imagination, I explore how colonialism, decolonization, and the cultural Cold War shaped, and were shaped by, South Asian literary forms and the circulation of ideas.

My work is grounded in materialist cultural theory, drawing on Raymond Williams, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said. It has intervened in debates on the Capitalocene and argued for understanding literary forms as sites of utopian spatial desire, especially in the context of decolonization. It also engages South Asian theoretical and philosophical traditions, among them classical rasa theory, Advaita Vedānta, and Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava thought, reading them alongside western critical frameworks so that each illuminates the other. My scholarship is interdisciplinary, informed above all by cultural geography and imperial history. It has been supported by competitive grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and Germany’s Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

Before my doctoral studies, I worked as a television journalist in India from 2003 to 2007. I am also a translator and photographer.