Devesh Kapur Named Director-Asia Programs at Johns Hopkins International Studies School

The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has appointed Dr. Devesh Kapur as Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies and Director of Asia Programs.

“It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Devesh Kapur to the school’s faculty,” said Dean Vali Nasr. “We will benefit immensely from his extensive scholarship in the study of India and South Asian politics, and his pioneering research on how local-global linkages affect political and economic change in development countries. We look forward to Dr. Kapur’s leadership in deepening the school’s expertise on Asia and expanding the cross-disciplinary nature of Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS,” said Nasr.

Kapur is the author of Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India (Princeton University Press), which earned him a 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association and The Other One Percent: Indians in America (with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh) for which he received a Choice Outstanding Title of 2017.

Before joining Johns Hopkins SAIS, Devesh was a professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, holding the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his tenure at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard. Kapur received the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize, awarded to the best junior faculty at Harvard College and Outstanding Teaching in Political Science by the American Political Science Association, in 2005. Devesh holds a doctorate from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and a bachelor’s from the Indian Institute of Technology at Varanasi.