Shahnaz Bashir Email and Phone Number

I’m a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I’m interested in visual studies, autoethnography, narrative inquiry, narratology and philosophy of communication. Through myriad interdisciplinary inquiries and qualitative probes, I love to explore themes such as war, politics, religion, colonialism, popular culture, technological communication & AI, food-mediated communication and aberrations in intrasocial communication. I specifically like to use images and imaginaries as lenses to look at various problems in the world. I was awarded the prestigious Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellowship at UMass Amherst. I have over fifteen years of university-level teaching experience in creative writing, conflict/war reporting, literary journalism and print-media editing; this experience currently includes my role as a Graduate Teaching Associate at UMass Amherst where I teach the undergrad writing course COMM 375 Writing as Communication. I’m also an accomplished writer, with several awards and publications to my name, including my two books of literary fiction, The Half Mother (Hachette) and Scattered Souls (HarperCollins), which have been translated into multiple languages. My forthcoming book is The Disease. My literary works and life have become subjects of academic attention, with numerous scholars writing research papers and completing PhDs on my books and my life. I’m also a juror for the "True Story Award" and a contributing editor at the Punch Magazine. I was recently honored with the Emerging Scholar Award 2024: at the Fifteenth International Conference on The Image: "Images and Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence" by Common Ground Research Network, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign IL. I have recently developed a senior-year level course called “Pixelated Lies: Decoding Digital Deceit” which I hope to teach next Spring at UMass. The course will study and help understand the technological, philosophical and artistic nuances of AI-generated visuals and also train to debunk them.