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.”
Jocelyn Alexander’s research interests lie in the social and political history of southern Africa, particularly liberation struggles and their legacies, law and punishment, violence and memory, and rural politics and land reform. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded collaborative research project titled ‘Global Soldiers in the Cold War: Making southern Africa’s liberation armies’, and writing a history of political imprisonment in Zimbabwe.
She has taught at Sussex and Bristol Universities and has been a Research Associate at the University of Zimbabwe. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern African Studies and the publications committee of the International Africa Institute.
She is co-author with JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger of Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the 'Dark Forests' of Matabeleland (James Currey, 2000), and author of The Unsettled Land: The Politics of Land and State-making in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003 (James Currey, 2006).
Jocelyn Alexander teaches primarily on the MPhil in Development Studies and the DPhil in International Development.
Jocelyn Alexander's research concerns the social and political history of southern Africa and uses qualitative methodologies, notably oral history and archival research. She is happy to consider applications within this broad field. More specifically, she is interested in projects concerned with the history and legacies of nationalism and liberation struggles; disciplinary regimes and law, and the making of state institutions more generally; rural politics, particularly as it concerns ideas, movements and institutions; and the politics of memory. Note that much of her research reaches into the present and is concerned with the legacies of contested histories.
She is also interested in projects that make use of innovative qualitative methodologies and cross-disciplinary approaches (history, anthropology, politics, literature). She occasionally supervises topics outside southern Africa where they are thematically linked to her research interests.
Southern African social and political history; liberation movements and their legacies; violence and memory; political imprisonment; rural politics and state-making