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.”
Professor Nandini Gooptu is a co-investigator on a new ESRC-funded project investigating the multiple determinants of violence against women in Delhi NCR and Johannesburg.
The ESRC has awarded £1.76 million from 2020 to 2023, allocated from the Global Challenges Research Fund, to Principal Investigator Dr Manali Desai (University of Cambridge), and Co-Investigators Dr Nandini Gooptu (University of Oxford), Prof. Sanjay Srivastava (Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi), Prof. Kammila Naidoo (University of Johannesburg) and Dr Lyn Ossome (Makerere Institute).
The project will emphasise the mechanisms of violence in specific cases and localized environments, which will be linked to urban transformation, inequality and emerging gender/racial/caste/class relations through a multi-scalar research design. By gathering historically contextual and granular data, the project takes forward a ‘second wave’ research on violence, specifically sexual violence and domestic interpersonal violence.
The project seeks to capture the experiences of transition from apartheid to post-apartheid and liberalization in South Africa, and from state-led development to neoliberalization as manifested in urban India, and explore how the attendant shifts in security, ownership, rights, dispossession, and value are manifested in episodes and enactments of gendered violence in the two cities.
The emphasis on qualitative methodologies in this project will enable researchers to immerse themselves in the daily life of specific neighbourhoods, while at the same time looking at how local and national state agencies and policies frame the problem of gendered violence. The project will seek to compare the particular insights from the two cities, to draw broader conclusions about the effects of globalisation and urban transformation on gender relations and violence.