Jiya is a historian of disability, gender, sexuality, caste, and transnational welfare in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. Her dissertation offers a transnational “concept-history” of “disability” in and beyond India from the 1930s to 1990s, focusing on its co-constitutions with ideas about race, caste, and class to imbue imperial, nationalist, and global political projects with moral authority. Rather than taking "disability" as a bounded, defined term, she deploys the tools of feminist, queer, and crip theory to read "disability" as contextual and historical, changing depending on who is deploying it and why. In so doing, the project rejects binaries of Western "disability" and "authentic" Indian bodily alterity, instead focusing on the hybrid forms of "disability" found in transnational welfare networks emanating to and from India.

Jiya’s work on disability, race, caste, class, gender, and care extends beyond her research to her teaching and advocacy. At Princeton, she has taught courses in global history, oral history, US history, and gender and sexuality studies, and been involved in the department’s Global History and History Dialogues program and the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative. Jiya has also been involved in curriculum development and reform in these programs and through her #CripCOVID19 Syllabus, which was featured on the Visualizing the Virus digital humanities project. She was appointed as the inaugural UMatter Graduate Fellow, developing programming and resources for graduate students on mental health, substance abuse, and power-based violence, invited to serve on the university’s Ad-Hoc Committee on Sexual Climate, Culture, and Conduct, and was awarded a Social Impact GradFutures fellowship.

More information on Jiya can be found on her website.