Faculty Author Q&A: Zahid R. Chaudhary on ‘Paranoid Publics’

Zahid R. Chaudhary is an associate professor in the Department of English and the interim director of the Program in South Asian Studies. His latest book “Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth” was published in November 2025 by Fordham University Press.

How did you get the idea for this project?

An invitation from The English Institute in 2018 to lecture on the topic of “Truth-Telling” was the first opportunity I had to start writing about the alarming diminishment of truth in contemporary cultural politics. I became so involved in the topic, and as the political landscape in the US and Europe became increasingly authoritarian, I decided to set aside a book I was researching on postcolonial countries, and turned my attention completely to this book focused largely (but not exclusively) on the US. The reigning explanations for assaults on truth had imputed the phenomenon to the influence of social media and/or the deleterious effects of social and economic policy. These explanations seemed incomplete to me, since they did not account for the emotional magnetism at the heart of a new and emerging politics of truth. This account is what Paranoid Publics aims to provide.