Areas of Interest: Development and comparative political economy, globalization, democratization and civil society with a focus on South Asia and Southern Africa.
Patrick Heller is a professor of sociology and co-director of the Graduate Program in Development.
His main area of research is the comparative study of democratic deepening, with a particular focus on how institutional designs and civil society configurations promote more participatory forms of governance. His long-term project is to re-evaluate the relationship between development, democracy and civil society by comparing India, Brazil and South Africa.
He is currently engaged in an NSF-funded research project on the post-apartheid city, using both GIS data and qualitative fieldwork to examine the impact of planned transformation on the racial and economic reconfiguration of South Africa’s three mega cities. He has also collaborated on a long-term study of politics and institutional reform in Brazilian municipalities, to be published in a co-authored book, Making Space for Civil Society (Stanford University Press).
He has been a visiting researcher at the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, South Africa, and an associate professor of sociology and international affairs at Columbia University.
He is the author of The Labor of Development: Workers in the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Cornell University Press, 1999) and co-author of Social Democracy and the Global Periphery (Cambridge University Press, 2006). He has published articles in Politics and Society, World Politics, World Development, and the Journal of Development Studies.
Heller holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.