Anirban Baishya

Expertise and Activities

Anirban Baishya is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, & Culture at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests lie at the intersection of visual and digital cultures, with a particular emphasis on media aesthetics, ethics and affect. 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. His monograph The Selfie Machine: Selfies, Platforms and Digital Image Culture in India is under contract with Rutgers University Press and scheduled for publication in 2026.

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.

His work has been published in venues such as International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Text & Performance Quarterly, and Media, Culture & Society.

Education

• PhD, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, 2018
• M. Phil., Cinema Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India 2013
• M.A, Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, 2011
• B.A., Political Science, Cotton College, Gauhati University, India, 2006

Books

• The Selfie Machine: Selfies, Platforms and Digital Image Culture in India (Forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2026)
• South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene (Co-edited with Darshana S. Mini, Routledge, 2024)

Special journal issues

• “Pedagogies of Care in an Age of Anxiety,” co-edited with Hannah Goodwin, & Anthony Grajeda, Teaching Dossier for Journal of Cinema & Media Studies 64, 6 (Winter 2025).
• “South Asian Pornographies II,” (Co-edited), Porn Studies,Vol. 9, No. 3 (2022).
• “South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene,” (Co-edited), Porn Studies. Vol 7. No. 1, 2020.
• “Small Media and Everyday Life: Digital Media Beyond Big Data,” Spectator (The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism), Vol. 39, No. 2, Fall 2019.
• “Subjected to play: Power, Participation and Subjectivity in Gaming and Beyond,” (Co-Edited), Spectator, 38 (1) Spring 2018.

Articles

• “Viral Nationalism: Right-Wing Populism and the Aesthetics of Distributed Participation,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 28, 3 (2025): 597-616.
• “(Dis)locating South Asia: Diasporic markets in the global streaming landscape,” co-authored with Darshana S. Mini, Media, Culture & Society, November 2025.
• “More Dangerous than Sharks: Space, Death and Pathologies of the Selfie,” Media, Culture & Society 47, 2 (2025): 354-374.
• “Introduction: “Pedagogies of Care in an Age of Anxiety,”  co-authored with Hannah Goodwin, & Anthony Grajeda, Teaching Dossier for Journal of Cinema Studies 64, 6 (Winter 2025)
• “Talking About Race, Colonialism and Inequality in a Media Studies Classroom (Or How I Learnt to [not]Stop Worrying and Teach the Bomb),” in Baishya et. al. eds., “Pedagogies of Care in an Age of Anxiety,” Teaching Dossier for Journal of Cinema Studies 64, 6 (Winter 2025
• “Main/streaming Porn Discourse: 10 Years of Porn Studies and Reminiscing on South Asian Pornocultures,” co-authored with Darshana S. Mini, Porn Studies, 11, 4 (2024): 367–379.
• “The Anti-Caste Alter-Network: Equality Labs and Anti-Caste Activism in the US,” Co-authored with Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Communication, Culture & Critique 16, 2 (2023): 99–106.
• “Hit like, please subscribe: OnlyFans, camming, and new directions in Indian erotic performance cultures,” co-authored with Darshana S, Mini, Porn Studies 12, no.1 (2023): 78-89.
• “Violent Spectating: Hindutva Music and Audio-visualizations of Hate and Terror in Digital India,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, 3 (2022): 289-309.
• “Figuring the aggregated Aunty: Netporn, Metadata and South Asian aunties,” Text and Performance Quarterly 42, no. 3. 2022, 315-331.
• “Through a Drone Darkly: Drone Media as Pandemic Witnessing,” BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 13: 1, 2022, 24–32.
• “The Conquest of the World as Meme: Memetic Visuality and Political Humor in Critiques of the Hindu Right Wing in India,” Media, Culture & Society (January 2021), doi:10.1177/0163443720986039
• “Chronicles of a Meme Foretold: Political Memes as Folk Memory in India,” Communication, Culture & Critique, 14: 3, 2021, 497-506.
• “Translating Porn Studies: Lessons from the Vernacular,” co-written with Darshana S. Mini. Porn Studies (Special Issue: “South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene”), Porn Studies, Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2020, pp. 1-12

• “Transgressions in Toonland: Savita Bhabhi, Velamma and the Indian Adult Comic” co-written with Darshana S. Mini. Porn Studies (Special Issue: “South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene”), Porn Studies Vol. 7, Issue 1, 2020, pp. 115-131

• “The Bully in the Pulpit: Digital Social Media and Right-wing Populist Technoculture” co-written with Nitin Govil. Communication, Culture & Critique (Special Issue: Media and the Extreme Right), Vol. 11 (2018), pp. 67-84.

• “Restore, Revisit, Re-member: Reinstating the Region in Three Assamese Films” in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 40, Issue 3, 2017. pp. 431-446.

• “Pornography of Place: Location, leaks and Obscenity in Indian MMS porn video” in South Asian Popular Culture, Vol.15, Issue1, 2017. pp 57-71.

• “#NaMo: The Political Work of the Selfie in the 2014 Indian General Elections” in International Journal of Communication, Vol. 9, 2015. pp. 1686-1700
• “Trauma, Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and the Post Human” in Wide Screen, Vol.3, No.1, 2011.

Book chapters

• “”Such Amaze, Much Wow” (Or How to Read a Meme)” in Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon (eds.) Reading Media:How to Do Textual Analysis, (NYU Press, 2026), pp. 231-245.
• “Digital Culture” (keyword entry) in Alessandro Nai, Max Grömping, and Dominique Wirz (eds.) Encyclopedia of Political Communication (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025).
• “It Lurks in the Deep: Memetic Terror and the Blue Whale Challenge in India,” in Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw (eds.) INC Reader #15: Critical Meme Research: Global Mutations of the Viral Image (Institute of Network Cultures, 2021), 248-260.
• South Asian Pornographies,” co-authored with Darshana S. Mini, in Peter Alilunas, Patrick Keilty, and Darshana Mini (eds) The Intellect Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect Press, 2026).
• “Gandii Baat”, co-authored with Darshana S. Mini, in Desirae Embree, Peter Alilunas and Farrah Freibert (eds.), Screening Adult Cinema: Routledge Screening Companion to Adult Film (Routledge, 2025).
• “Reimaging the Migrant in the Time of the Pandemic” with, in Rohit Dasgupta, Niharika Banerjea and Paul Boyce (eds.) COVID-19 Assemblages: Queer and Feminist Ethnographies from South Asia. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge (2022): 34-44.

Public Scholarship

• “The 2025 TikTok Moment: Possibilities and Perils,” Spectra: NCA Digital Magazine, October 2025.
• “Hate in the Time of the Virus: Covid-19, Fake News, and Islamophobia in India,” items: Insights from the Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council, 2022.
• “(En)Gendering Digital India,” Docalogue, July 2022.
• “Understanding Jyotiprasad Agarwala’s Cinema,” Sahapedia, 2020.

Awards, honors & fellowships

• Outstanding Article Award for “Viral Nationalism: Right-Wing Populism and the Aesthetics of Distributed Participation,” Asian/Pacific American Communication Studies Division/Caucus, National Communication Association, 2025.
• Library Research Enhancement Grant (with Co-PI: Todd Michelson-Ambelang), UW-Madison, 2024.  Awarded for Indian Media & Communication at the Turn of Liberalization.
• SSRC, Rapid-Response Grant on Covid-19 and the Social Sciences, 2020.

• RESTS (Race, Ethnicity, Science, Technology, and Speculation): Mellon Interdisciplinary Seminar, Fordham University, 2020-21.

• UCI Global Fellows Early Career Fellow, 2020.

• Signal Culture Researcher in Residence, 2019.