Diya Deviah

Diya Deviah is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History. Her doctoral research traces a global history of the coal commodity frontier in Dhanbad, India’s coal capital, to examine the making of corporate power in modern South Asia. She is interested in how coal emerges not only as an extractive resource but as a force that reshapes legal, social, and ecological boundaries, extending extractive capitalism into new terrains of power. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of capitalism, law, and empire, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from environmental studies and science and technology studies (STS). Through archival and field studies of the company town, railway lines, and energy grids, she studies how extractive capitalism works recursively, reordering both landscapes and lifeworlds at the commodity frontier.

 

Before coming to Yale, Diya was Assistant Professor of Law at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), where she taught courses in legal theory, family law, and writing, and co-founded The Writing Centre to support interdisciplinary pedagogy and student-led inquiry. Her earlier research explored the legal personhood of the corporation, the limits of constitutional regulation of corporate power, and the public-private divide in Indian constitutional law. She is also committed to public history and the cultivation of an archival imagination beyond the university. She has ongoing interests in public history, curation, and the design of archivally-informed exhibitions.

 

Keywords: histories of capitalism; law; environmental history; material history; mining and extraction; STS; commodity frontiers