Box 1916

Maxcy Hall

112 George Street

Providence, RI 02912

Telephone: (401) 863-2367

Sociology@brown.edu

 

410 Maxcy Hall
401-863-7465 phone
401-863-3213 fax
Patrick_Heller@brown.edu

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

Brown University Research Profile Page

Areas of Interest:
Development, Political Sociology, Comparative Political Economy, Democratization, Social Movements

Curriculum Vitae

Patrick Heller’s main current 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. He is the author of The Labor of Development (Cornell University Press, 1999) which examines the role of subordinate classes in the transformation to capitalism in the Indian state of Kerala. He is also the co-author with R. Sandbrook, M. Edelman and J. Teichman of Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects (Cambridge University Press). He has written on a range of topics on India, including democratic consolidation, the politics of economic transformation, social capital and social movements. He has also conducted fieldwork in South Africa, exploring processes of democratization through case studies of the civics movement and local government re-structuring. With Daniel Schensul, a graduate student in the Brown sociology department, he is currently engaged in an NSF-funded research project on the post-apartheid city. The project uses 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. His long-term project is to re-evaluate the relationship between development, democracy and civil society through a comparative analysis of India, Brazil and South Africa.

Patrick Heller is co-director (with Barbara Stallings) of the Graduate Program in Development (GPD), an interdisciplinary training program for PhD students in the social sciences. He teaches Theory and Research in Development (DS 200 and 201), Recent Sociological Theory (So 205), Democracy and Civil Society in Comparative Perspective (So 297) and Globalization and Social Conflict (So 162).