Jiayin specializes in modern Chinese history, with particular interests in material culture, business history, and the construction of urban modernity. Her research examines how technologies, commodities, and infrastructures reshaped everyday life and sensory experience in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Her current project traces the transformation of the A.S. Watson Company from a colonial dispensary into a major commercial enterprise, exploring how Western medicine, patent drugs, and aerated beverages reconfigured consumer culture and interacted with medicinal practices across Hong Kong, Canton, Shanghai and Southeastern Asia.

In related work, she investigates the emergence of urban lighting in Shanghai, analyzing how artificial illumination mediated visual perception, ritual practice, and leisure culture, and contributed to the experiential making of visual modernity. Her broader research agenda explores how global technologies, including figures such as Thomas Edison, were localized, reinterpreted, and embedded in modern and contemporary Chinese society.