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Nanoparticle – polymer composites, or polymer nanocomposites, are ubiquitous in the modern world. Controlled dispersion of nanoparticles in nanocomposites is often a critical requirement and has lead to evolution of a variety of strategies for regulating nanoparticle interactions and assembly. This work focuses on one such technique wherein the nanoparticle surfaces are densely tethered with polymer chains. Complete screening of the interparticle interactions and steric repulsion among the tethered chains thus results in repulsive and stable nanoparticles across a range of polymer molecular weights and chemistries and nanoparticle volume fraction. These nanoparticles are found to be ideal for studying polymer nanocomposites, and a phase diagram constructed on the basis of nanoparticle arrangements is presented. Tethered nanoparticles, in the limit small tethered polymer chains, also serve as model systems for studying the properties of soft nanoparticles. Well-dispersed suspensions of these soft nanoparticles in oligomers exhibit unique properties across the jamming transition, including anomalous structural and dynamic trends typically associated with complex molecular fluids. In the jammed regime, these suspensions behave as typical soft glasses and allow for quantitative comparisons with the existing models for soft glasses. At the same time, the tethered chain