The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Having been perceived by colonial officials as an ‘unsafe’ region for human settlement during the first half of the 19th century, northwest Zimbabwe presents a fascinating space to explore consequent medical interventions to sanitise the region. The ambition of colonial state medical projects saw the establishment of biomedical infrastructures like tsetse gates, roads, fences and clinics, as well as the introduction of tsetse and mosquito eradication campaigns such as game elimination, bush clearing and aerial spaying.
Apart from the introduction of development agendas, the region experienced a rapid population growth and a creation of new social hierarchies as a result of colonial displacements from the 1950s. Thus, with its unprecedented demographic growth, a mixture of different ethnic identities with diverse religious and medical ideas, Gokwe remains an interesting space to explore African encounters with colonial medicine.
This study suggests that beyond these colonial biomedical infrastructures lay crude histories and rich collective narratives to supplement our understanding of colonial medical history. The study suggests that biomedical colonial infrastructures are not only emotional objects with abstract entities such as protocol, regulations on mobility and memory, but they have the ability to uncover the interpenetration, negotiation and expropriation of scientific medical ideas.