The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.
Professor Harriss-White is a political economist and field-economist with interests in the social ordering and state regulation of the market economy (studied through the production and distribution of basic commodities in various regions of South Asia and through four decades of field-research on a small market town and its rural hinterland), as well as its casualties (hence research into gender discrimination, poverty, destitution, malnutrition/alcoholism, disability, social discrimination and ageing).
She is now interested in energy and materials in the food economy.
She was director of ODID between 2004 and 2007 and founder-director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme in the School of Area Studies.
