Image Description: A black and white photo of Dr. Pandya, a South Asian femme-presenting person with glasses and a nose-ring, with long hair pulled over their left shoulder. They are wearing a coat and turtleneck sweater, and smiling. Behind them is a stone wall.
I am a scholar who works at the intersections of postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, transnational histories of the body, labor, migration, race, and caste, and 20th and 21st century global history.
I am currently Instructional Faculty, cross-appointed in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Department of History at Yale University.
I am working on a book which centers the Global South as a key epistemological site for telling a genealogy of the concept of “disability.” The monograph offers rich archival insight into networks of transnational disability welfare that circulated to and from emerging nation state of India between the 1930s and 1990s. Adding to scholarship which argues that disability was constructed alongside race and gender, I introduce the importance of caste as co-constitutive of disability, particularly through the notion of “social disability.” Other research projects focus on Global South vernaculars of disability justice and on the history of food, embodiment, and labor in the Indian diaspora.
I have been fortunate to have my research and writing supported and recognized by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, the Critical Disability Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, the Coordinating Council of Women in History, the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and various departments and programs at Princeton University, from where I received my PhD in summer 2025.