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.”
Nandini Gooptu is Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development and Fellow of St Antony's College. She is currently Associate Head of the Social Sciences Division for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. She was Head of Department between 2012 and 2016. She has been Senior Tutor, Sub Warden and Acting Warden at St Antony’s. Educated in Calcutta and at Cambridge, she previously held research fellowships and taught at St John’s College and Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge.
She is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-Twentieth Century India(Cambridge University Press, 2001), editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India(Routledge, 2013), and joint-editor of India and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, Oxford History of the British Empire series, 2012) and Persistence of Poverty in India (Social Science Press, 2013 and Routledge, 2017).
Trained as a social historian, her past research was on urban politics and poverty in colonial India. Her recent research is multidisciplinary and concerned with social and political transformation and cultural change in contemporary India in the wake of economic liberalisation and globalisation. She is currently researching new cultures of work in India and leading the India leg of an ESRC-funded project on urban transformation and gendered violence in India and South Africa, in collaboration with the Universities of Cambridge (lead institution) and Johannesburg. She has researched and published on a variety of subjects, including caste and religious politics, urban change and politics, poverty and labour, enterprise culture, skill development, media and politics, and social movement of sex workers.
She is the chair of the international advisory board and editorial board of Oxford Development Studies. She is a member of the editorial boards of Springer’s “Exploring Urban change in South Asia” book series and Anthem’s “Modern South Asian History” series. She was the editor of the “Diversity and Plurality in South Asia” book series of Anthem Press.
For the MPhil in Development Studies, Nandini Gooptu lectures on the History and Politics foundation course, the Core Course and the Research Methods course. She offers a paper on the History and Politics of South Asia for the MPhils in Development Studies, Politics (Department of Politics and International Relations), and Modern South Asian Studies (Oxford Department of Global and Area Studies). She also teaches South Asian Politics for the undergraduate PPE degree course. She has previously been the Director of Graduate Studies in Development Studies, the Director of Doctoral Research in International Development and the Course Director and Chair of Examiners of the MPhil in Development Studies.
She has supervised over 40 doctoral students, including the current cohort, in the Departments of International Development, Politics, and Sociology, and in the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford. Her former students have gone on to take up academic appointments at major universities in the UK, India, USA and elsewhere.
She was the recipient of a University of Oxford Teaching Excellence Award, in 2008, for “Outstanding teaching and commitment to teaching”.
South Asian studies, with a focus on India; globalisation, labour and changing cultures of work in India; youth, politics and poverty; urban gendered violence; contemporary India's enterprise culture and the complexities of the making of the 'enterprising self', covering workplace culture, the media, mental health and personality development, religion and spirituality, education and skill training; urban development and politics; urbanisation and social history of metropolitan and small-town India; the urban poor and politics; democracy, rights, political identity and social movements.