Devesh Kapur, non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, is the Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India and director of the Center for Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, he held appointments at the Brookings Institution, Harvard University, and University of Texas–Austin.
His research examines local-global linkages in political and economic change in developing countries (particularly India), focusing on the role of domestic and international institutions and international migration and the effects of market reforms on socially marginalized groups.
His publications include The World Bank: Its First Half Century (co-authored with John Lewis and Richard Webb, Brookings); Give Us Your Best and Brightest: The Global Hunt for Talent and Its Impact on the Developing World (with John McHale, Center for Global Development), and Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design (co-edited with Pratap Mehta, Oxford University Press). His most recent book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India (Princeton University Press), received the 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of International Studies Association.
Devesh has a BTech and MS in chemical engineering and a PhD in Public Policy from Princeton University. He received the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize awarded to the best junior faculty at Harvard College in 2005.
