معرفی
Jiya Pandya is a historian and scholar at the intersection of disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial theory, and transnational histories of the body. She holds dual roles as Instructional Faculty in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Department of History at Yale University, and as Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International Area Studies.
- Primary Affiliation: Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Department of History, Yale University
- Education: PhD in History (2025) from Princeton University
Her research interrogates the co-constitutive nature of disability, race, caste, class, and gender in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. She employs feminist, queer, and crip theory to analyze transnational welfare networks and their role in shaping moral authority for imperial, nationalist, and global political projects. Current projects include a book on the Global South as an epistemological site for disability genealogy, research on Global South vernaculars of disability justice, and studies on food, embodiment, and labor in the Indian diaspora.
Key themes in her work include: caste as a form of “social disability,” decolonizing disability frameworks, and hybridity in transnational welfare discourses.
Jiya has received significant recognition for her scholarship and advocacy, including:
- UMatter Graduate Fellow
- Social Impact GradFutures fellowship
- Support from the Critical Disability Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association
- Coordinating Council of Women in History funding
She actively contributes to curriculum development and reform through initiatives like the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative and the #CripCOVID19 Syllabus, which was featured in the Visualizing the Virus digital humanities project.
