The Loft Hour: Shiben Banerji + Alexandra Lossada

Shiben Banerji joins the Berkeley community after eleven years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was an associate professor in the Department Art History, Theory, and Criticism. He earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, as well as a Master in City Planning, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Columbia University. Interested in the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture, Shiben’s 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). 

Alexandra Lossada works on immigration, citizenship, and language in contemporary American ethnic literatures, especially in Latinx and Chicanx writing. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled The Interpreter of Crimmigration and Detention, reevaluates the figure and the role of the interpreter in post-9/11 literary works that depict detention, deportation, and/or family separation via the legal apparatus of crimmigration, or the intersection of criminal law with immigration law. Her work has recently been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for 2025-2026. Before joining Berkeley, Lossada worked as an assistant professor of English at Berry College (2022-2025). She received her PhD in English at the Johns Hopkins University in 2022.

Estelle Tarica is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture. Her research and teaching cover a diversity of topics: colonial and modern ideologies of race and nation in Latin America; Indigenous expression in the Andes and Mesoamerica; human rights discourses and memory debates after the Cold War; Jewish Latin America; Holocaust consciousness in global perspective; and the transformative power of narrative and poetry. Her first book, The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), explores the subjective effects of racialized national identity formations in Mexico, Bolivia and Peru. Her second book, Holocaust Consciousness and Cold War Violence in Latin America (SUNY Press, 2022), is about the impact of Holocaust memories and terminologies as reference points for authors and activists confronting state violence in Argentina, Mexico and Guatemala from the 1960s to the present. She is affiliated with the Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, and the Center for Jewish Studies.