Zahid R. Chaudhary is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. His book, Paranoid Publics: Psychopolitics of Truth will be published in Autumn 2025. The book concerns the problem of facts and established truths being regularly denied in contemporary life. This situation has brought paranoid politics into the mainstream, from conspiracy theories like QAnon, to sex panics and assaults on public health measures, to election denialism and the rise of vigilante militias. Paranoid Publics analyzes these phenomena as psychosocial realities enmeshed with emerging ways of determining truth.  He is also the author of Afterimage of Empire: Nineteenth-Century Photography in India and is currently at work on a book entitled, Impunity: Notes on a Global Tendency.