Africa Initiative

Patrick Heller is the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences and the Director of the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson School for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology. Heller's main area of research is the comparative study of social inequality and democratic deepening. He is the author of "The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India" (Cornell 1999) and co-author of "Social Democracy and the Global Periphery" (Cambridge 2006), "Bootstrapping Democracy: Transforming Local Governance and Civil Society in Brazil" (Stanford 2011) and "Deliberation and Development: Rethinking the Role of Voice and Collective Action in Unequal Societies" (World Bank Group 2015). Heller has published articles on urbanization, comparative democracy, social movements, development policy, civil society, and state transformation. His most recent collaborative project - Citizenship, Inequality, and Urban Governance (CIUG) in India - has generated multiple reports and articles. His work has been featured in multiple publications including the American Sociological Journal, Annual Review of Sociology and International Sociology.