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Bio

Shahnaz Bashir is a doctoral student and teaching associate in Communication at UMass Amherst. He holds a Master’s degree with Rank 1: University Gold Medal and Award of Merit in Mass Communication and Journalism from the University of Kashmir. 

Interests

Methodologically, he is seeking a confluence of creative and critical aspects of communication, a convergence of practice and theory, and artistic and analytical ways to perform research. His broad research interests are narrative inquiry, storytelling, autoethnography, memory studies, the ekphrasis of "untaken photographs", and how technology affects creativity. He also loves philosophy of communication and is passionate about troubling ideas, concepts, tenets, terms and even raw thoughts about communication and media. 

Publications

Shahnaz is the author of two award-winning books The Half Mother (Hachette, 2014) and Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016). The Half Mother is the first book from Kashmir ever to be translated into several foreign languages. Besides, he has written and published several essays and autoethnographic pieces in various anthologies/books and platforms like Time magazine, etc. His latest published work are an essay on the new press policy of India and an ekphrastic essay on the Palladium Cinema of Kashmir. His forthcoming book is The Disease—a novel.  

Grants

Shahnaz was awarded the Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) summer Fellowship by the UMass Amherst. He has twice been a finalist for the Distinguished Teaching Award (Grad Instr) at UMass Amherst in 2021 and 2022.