Rohit Chopra

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I am a Professor in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. I have been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for South Asia at Stanford University, an Assistant Professor at Babson College, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Emory University. Before a life in academia, I worked in the Indian legacy media and academic publishing industries and in the corporate web solutions division of rediff.com, a pioneering startup and India's first online portal.

 

My work centers on global media and cultural identity, new media, and media and memory, with a particular focus on global Hindu nationalist and far-right online communities. More recent interests include the history of ideas in cultural texts, food and media, global music, and disability and media.I have also done some work on history of the Gadar Party, a Bay Area-based political organization that fought for Indian independence in the twentieth century.

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I am the author of The Gita for a Global World: Ethical Action in an Age of Flux (Westland, 2021), The Virtual Hindu Nation: Saffron Nationalism and New Media (HarperCollins, 2019) and Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from Colonialism to Cyberspace (Cambria, 2008) and co-editor of Global Media, Culture, and Identity: Theory, Cases, and Approaches (Routledge, 2011). I am also the editor of a special issue of the Economic and Political Weekly (2011) on the theme of the resurgence of empire. I have published in a number of journals, including Socialist Studies, New Media and Society, the International Journal of Communication, Global Media and Communication, and First Monday, in addition to authoring several book chapters. I am currently working on two book projects: an academic monograph on the memory of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, the 1992-93 riots that followed, and and the 1993 bomb blasts in Bombay, and a trade book on disability in global culture, respectively.

I write on media, politics, society, and culture for a number of international media organizations. I have published in the Conversation, BBC India, South China Morning Post, Outlook India, Scroll India, Wire India, LiveMint,  Print India, Quartz, Caravan India, and New Inquiry and have appeared on or been cited in Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, Wired, Vice, The Guardian, Voice of America, Religion News Network, Buzzfeed, and Business Insider, among other media outlets. 

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I co-founded and co-hosted the India Explained podcast, which ran from 2018 to 2023. I have also served as consultant for global government and private sector organizations with regard to the impact of legacy media, new media, and social media on diversity, human rights, and politics. I am also a part of the South Asia Scholarly Activist Collective, an initiative committed to inclusive politics, academic freedom, and scholarship in the humanities.