Dr. Debashish Banerji

Debashish Banerji is a scholar of Indian philosophy, art history, and consciousness studies, and one of the foremost academic interpreters of Sri Aurobindo's thought in the Western university context. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he completed his doctoral work on the art of Abanindranath Tagore. He holds the Haridas Chaudhuri Chair at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, where he teaches in the East-West Psychology program.

Banerji's scholarly work spans several intersecting domains: the philosophy and yoga psychology of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Indian modernism and the Bengal School of Art, consciousness studies and integral theory, and the relationship between technology, posthumanism, and the Supramental. He is a key figure in bringing Sri Aurobindo studies into formal academic discourse in North America, and has been instrumental in positioning CIIS as the primary institutional home for this field in the West.

His publications include The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Sage, 2010), a landmark study of the painter's cultural nationalism and aesthetic philosophy, and Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo (D.K. Printworld, 2012), which offers a systematic reading of Sri Aurobindo's Record of Yoga as a document of transformative practice. He co-edited Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures (Springer Nature) and more recently Posthumanism and India: A Critical Cartography (Bloomsbury) and has contributed chapters and essays to numerous edited volumes and journals in philosophy, art history, and consciousness studies.

Banerji has taught extensively in university settings internationally and has lectured at major institutions in India, Europe, and North America, and is a regular presence at conferences at the intersection of integral philosophy, contemplative studies, and cultural theory.