Biography
Wazhmah Osman is a filmmaker and associate professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production and a member of the Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty at Temple University. She is also affiliate faculty of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist media ethnographies that focus on the political economy of global media industries and the regimes of representation and visual culture they produce.
She is the author of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists (U of Illinois P, 2020), which won the 2021 Activism, Communication, and Social Justice Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association. The book analyzes the impact of international funding and cross-border media flows on the politics of Afghanistan, the region, and beyond. She is also coeditor of the recent volume Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power (Duke, 2025, with Robert D. Crews), the first comprehensive volume to explore the impact of empires on Afghanistan’s past and present with a particular focus on the US intervention that began in 2001. She is also the coauthor of the forthcoming Afghanistan: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford) and the codirector of the critically acclaimed documentary Postcards from Tora Bora.
Her work has also appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Visual Anthropology Review, and other scholarly journals. She serves on the editorial boards of leading journals in the field, including Communication, Culture & Critique and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. She is also on the boards of the Middle Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association and the Afghanistan journal. Osman has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now!, NPR, and Al Jazeera, among other news outlets.
Courses Taught
| NUMBER | NAME | LEVEL |
| MSP-3153 | Media Criticism | Undergraduate |
| MSP-8254 | Media Campaigns for Social Change | Undergraduate |
| MMC 9102 | Researching Communication II | Graduate |
| MMC 9709 | Media Globalization | Graduate |
| MSP 4454 | Public Information Media Campaigns | Undergraduate |
| MSP 4496 | Global Media | Undergraduate |
| GDC 8003 | Research Approaches in Communication, Development and Social Change | Graduate |
| MSP 5021 | Media Institutions | Graduate |
| MSP 8254 | Public Information Media Campaigns | Graduate |
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
RECENT
Osman, W., and R. Crews, eds. Decolonizing Afghanistan: Countering Imperial Knowledge and Power. Duke University Press, 2025.
Osman, W. “‘Afghan Women’ Documentaries: The Political Economy of Giving and Taking Voice.” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 56, no. 2 (2025): 143–167.
Osman, W., and N. Bajoghli. “Decolonizing Transnational Feminism: Lessons from the Afghan and Iranian Feminist Uprisings of the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 20, no. 1 (2024): 1–22.
Osman, W. “Unruly Subjects: The Subaltern Struggle for Media Justice, Multimodality, and Autoethnography in Academia and Beyond.” Visual Anthropology Review 40, no. 2 (2024): 226–245.
Osman, W. “Afghan Television Dramas: Balancing Entertainment with the Realities of War.” In Middle Eastern Television Drama, edited by Christa Salamandra and Nour Halabi, 142–153. Routledge, 2023.
Osman, W. “Building Spectatorial Solidarity Against the ‘War on Terror’ Media-Military Gaze.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no. 2 (2022): 369–375.
Osman, W. “Transformations in Afghan Media and Culture Through Cycles of Upheaval.” Current History 121, no. 834 (2022): 135–140.
Osman, W., and K. Redrobe. “The Inclusions and Occlusions of Expanded Refugee Narratives: A Dialogue on Flee.” Film Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2022): 23–34.
Osman, W., H. Zeweri, and S. Karzai. “The Fog of the Forever War with a Laugh Track in United States of Al.” Middle East Report Online, May 26, 2021.
Education
DEGRE | DEGREE AND FIELD | SCHOOL |
2012 | PhD in Media and Communication | Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University |
2007 | Certificate in the Graduate Program in Culture and Media | Department of Anthropology, New York University |
2005 1997 | M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies Double B.A. in English and Film | Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University Douglass College, Rutgers University |
Personal Website
http://www.postcardsfromtorabora.com
Awards
2026-2027
- Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) Fellow
2023-2024
- Center for Media at Risk and CARGC Fellow, UPenn
Spring 2023
- Center for Experimental Ethnography Fellowship, UPenn, Spring 2023
2021-2022
- Outstanding Book Award for Television and the Afghan Culture Wars from the Activism, Communication, and Social Justice interest group of the International Communication Association
- Klein College Faculty Research Award
- Jack G. Shaheen Research Grant, NYU