Pooja Sen

Pooja Sen is a scholar of contemporary art, media, and postcolonial and Marxist theory. She studies how to live amid climate change today by taking stock of the reparative practices and aesthetic visions of artists who have done it in the past.

Her dissertation, “The World Builders,” is about contemporary artists who adapt nineteenth- and twentieth-century tools of colonialism, like terraforming, hydropower, land surveys, aerial photographs, and seed libraries, to build the world anew. The dissertation argues that the ideas of hope, love, and community that emerge from these artworks are important alternatives to climate despair and to old capitalist and colonialist habits of making the world. They provide new visions for how people can connect to each other and to the earth. She has presented her work at the College Art Association and Visible Evidence. Her research has been supported by the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

She is currently a research assistant at the Yale Center for British Art and a fellow at the Graduate Writing Lab. Previously, she was an editorial assistant at McGill-Queen’s University Press and the journal Social Text. She holds a First Class Joint Honours BA in Art History and History and an MA in Art History from McGill University.