Aliya Ram is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton. Her work explores the relationships between aesthetic innovation, subject formation and coercive social bonds, and she is writing her dissertation on experiments with literary address in twentieth century fiction and poetry from South Asia, the anglophone and francophone Caribbean, Britain and the United States. She works with materials in English, Hindi, Urdu and French and has translated between these languages. She also knows Chinese (advanced), Spanish (advanced) and Sanskrit (basic).

Aliya's academic work has been published by Critical Inquiry and Comparative Literature Studies, and is forthcoming in English Literary History. She is currently at work on a book about the translation workshop she co-founded in 2019, which will be published by Bloomsbury Academic's Literatures, Cultures, Translation series: Horizontal Translation: An Experiment With South Asian Literature. Before graduate school, Aliya worked for five years as a news reporter at the Financial Times, where her writing on technology was shortlisted for the British Press Awards and British Journalism awards. Her journalism has appeared elsewhere in the Washington Post, the BBC, The Guardian and The Wire. Aliya also writes fiction and poetry, which is represented by the Creative Artists Agency in London. She received her B.A. (Hons) in English Literature, with a paper in French, from the University of Cambridge.