Lineages of the Global City. A book chat between Shiben Banerji and Mark E. Canuel
Department of Art History Colloquium
November 7, 2025
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM America/Chicago
Shiben Banerji tells the story of spiritually inclined modernists who designated planned urban space as a site for forming a global ethos—meaning both an outlook on oneself as unavoidably linked to every creature and thing, as well as the obligation to choose and act with a regard for one's inexorable impact on others. He is joined in conversation by Mark E. Canuel (UIC English).
Bio:
Shiben Banerji is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of California, Shiben was an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research practice, historical scholarship, and classroom teaching focus on the work of art and design in cultivating habits of democratic judgment. Shiben is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025) and the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies (Intermezzo, 2025).
Mark Canuel is Professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Humanities. His research and teaching interests focus primarily on the areas of British Romanticism, Critical Theory, Political Theory, and Aesthetics. His work explores the connections between political and literary forms, particularly as they emerged in response to the pressures of revolution, reform, and religious dissent between the 1770s and the 1820s. He is author of three monographs: Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, 2002); The Shadow of Death: Romanticism, Literature, and the Subject of Punishment (Princeton, 2007); and Justice, Dissent, and the Sublime (Johns Hopkins, 2012). He is also editor of British Romanticism: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2015), a collection of new and previously published critical essays on Romanticism. He is currently at work on a new book on the aesthetics of political progressivism in the Romantic age. His numerous essays have appeared in journals including ELH, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Representations, Studies in Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle.
Date posted
Oct 15, 2025
Date updated
Oct 15, 2025