Shiben Banerji

Trained as an architect, city planner, and historian, Shiben Banerji is widely recognized for his field-defining contribution to the global urban humanities. Working across public policy, urban design, and classroom teaching, Shiben examines how a will for social and environmental justice can be cultivated in urban space. His historical scholarship is cited for advancing a new comparative approach to the work of architectural media in shaping economic subjectivities across metropolitan and colonized worlds in the interwar period. He is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press), which was supported by a Mellon Junior Fellowship in the Humanities, Urbanism, and Design, as well as a Graham Foundation Publication Grant. The book uncovers a prolific transnational conversation between artists, architects, pacifists, and anti-colonials that resulted in the design of cities, suburbs, and communes across the Americas, Europe, colonial South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949.

Shiben is currently completing two projects. The first is a six-part animated global history of architecture in the long 19th century, recuperating the colonial genealogy of our modernity. The second is a study of architectural and discursive sites of alienation and belonging entitled Infrastructures of Uncertainty, for which he was appointed as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Visiting Faculty at the Indian School of Public Policy. 

For his commitment to student success, Shiben was invited to deliver the faculty lecture at the 5th Annual Decolonization Dinner in 2019, and in 2020 received SAIC's Full-Time Faculty of the Year Award.  

• Melanie Ball (2021) “An Air of Serenity: Chicago’s Carl Sandburg Village and the Construction of Middle-Class Desire, c.1962”
• Nicolay Duque-Robayo (2021) “Curiosity in the City: Affect and the Formation of the Reflective Planner”