Anirban Baishya

Anirban Baishya earned his PhD from the Cinema and Media Studies Division at the University of Southern California, and in January 2022 joins UW Communication Arts from Fordham University, New York, where he was an Assistant Professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department. His research broadly focuses on the intersections between digital media and the public sphere in a global context. He studies how digital media regulates everyday life spaces and how the ensuing “customization” of our participation in public cultures problematizes binary notions such as private/public and individual/collective. The objects he analyzes in his work includes media forms such as selfies, memes and GIFs. His work locates such objects and technologies in various global and local contexts and puts them in conversation with broader social and political shifts. Baishya’s current book project is titled Viral Selves: Selfies and Digital Culture in India which is a study of India’s emerging digital cultures through the technocultural medium of the selfie.

In 2020, he was the recipient of a Social Science Research Council’s Rapid-Response Grant on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences, and as part of that project, he researched the role of online mobilization and the weaponization of hate speech in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.

Baishya’s work has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, South Asian Popular Culture, Porn Studies and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.