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.”
We are delighted to announce that Uma Pradhan, who completed her DPhil at ODID in 2016, has won a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship.
The three-year fellowship, titled '(Re)-constructing the state: rebuilding schools in post-earthquake Nepal' will be held at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OxGA).
Her fellowship will focus on the contested process of everyday state-building through a study on school reconstruction projects in post-earthquake Nepal. Taking ‘reconstruction’ as an analytic space of possibility, her research will investigate, firstly, the rebuilding of physical spaces and, secondly, the reconstruction of discursive spaces within which they are embedded, ie narratives about the (failing) state education system in Nepal.
This research will specifically focus on ‘aftermath epistemology’ to understand the ways in which a post-disaster shock is utilised to construct new visions for collective futures. By drawing attention to ongoing and new interventions by the state in spaces where everyday life is disrupted by a disaster, this aims to explore everyday practices of the state and the ways in which state is experienced, engaged with, and re-imagined by people.