Biography
Zahid R. Chaudhary is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He specialises in postcolonial studies, visual culture and critical theory. Some of his course titles include Difficult Art, Bollywood Cinema, Revolution (grad), Psychoanalysis and Postcolonialism (grad), Mimesis (grad) Introduction to Theory, Reading Literature: Fiction, Urban Fictions, Magical Realism, and Violence and the Modern.
His book, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), provides a historical and philosophical account of early photography in India, analysing how aesthetic experiments in colonial photographic practice shed light on the changing nature of perception and notions of truth, memory and embodiment.
He has also published articles in differences, Boundary 2, October, Social Text, Cultural Critique, South Asia, and Camera Obscura. His publications include Paranoid Publics in History of the Present (2022); Desert Blooms in October (2019); Impunity in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (2018); Itinerant Photography: Medium and Translation in the work of Imran Channa in Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (Bloombsbury, 2018); and On Finitude: ife and Death Under Neoliberalism in Fotofest 2018 Biennial: India, Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art. Exhibition Catalogue (Prestel, 2018).
He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Colby College, Waterville, Maine and a PhD from Cornell University.
Born in 1975 in Bahawalpur, Pakistan, he lives in New York City and works in Princeton, NJ.
SAF participation:
March Meeting 2022