Parijat Jha is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology, with graduate minors in Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is a cultural and environmental anthropologist whose research examines agrarian and ecological transformation in the Western Himalayas. His dissertation focuses on apple cultivation and climate change within a rapidly shifting landscape of industrial monoculture, analyzing how environmental stress, market pressures, and technological interventions reshape agricultural livelihoods.

Trained in visual anthropology, Jha incorporates visual methods both as a research methodology and as an analytic approach to questions of labor, value, and environmental change. His commitment to place-based inquiry developed during his MA in South Asian Studies at the University of Washington and has deepened through sustained ethnographic fieldwork in the Western Himalayas.

His research has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, an Amit Bhatia Global Research Grant, and multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships.