Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID) is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on political, social, economic, and environmental change across various contexts. To celebrate the launch of the special edition “Analyzing the Diversity of a Large Emerging Market: Sectoral Politics in India’s Multi-level Political Economy” in June 2025, a panel of guest editors and discussants will explore the dynamics and complexities of economic analysis. Liu Institute Faculty Fellow Susan Ostermann, one of the journal’s co-editors-in-chief, will moderate the discussion.
Free and open to the public. Light refreshments to follow.
Sponsored by the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the South Asia Group, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs.
Participants
- Anna Calasanti, Managing Editor, University of Notre Dame
- John Echeverri-Gent, Guest Editor, University of Virginia
- Devesh Kapur, Discussant, Johns Hopkins University
- Erin McDonnell, Editorial board and Discussant, University of Notre Dame
- Aseema Sinha, Guest Editor, Claremont McKenna College
- Steve Vogel, Discussant, University of California, Berkeley
- Moderated by Susan Ostermann, Co-Editor-in-Chief, University of Notre Dame
Biographies
Anna Calasanti is a postdoctoral research associate in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and the managing editor of the journal Studies in Comparative International Development. Her broader research combines intersectional theory and innovative methodological approaches (qualitative and quantitative) to unpack and address inequities in political and economic development in countries across the world. This includes questions about women and empowerment, experiences of intimate partner violence, bodily autonomy, environmental justice and health inequalities, decision-making and access to water, sanitation, and hygiene (WaSH), and violence against marginalized leaders during times of crisis. She earned a PhD in political science from the University of New Mexico, specializing in comparative politics and methodology. She also holds an MA in political science from the University of New Mexico, where she was a Latin American and Iberian Institute PhD Fellow; an MA in public and international affairs from George Mason University, and a BA in political science from Guilford College.
John Echeverri-Gent is an associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States and co-editor of Interpreting Politics: Situated Knowledge, India, and the Rudolph Legacy and Economic Reform in Three Giants: U.S. Foreign Policy and the USSR, China, and India. His many articles on comparative public policy and the political economy of development have appeared in Perspectives on Politics; PS: Political Science and Politics; World Development; Policy Studies Journal; Asian Survey; Contemporary South Asia; and India Review. Echeverri-Gent is a member of the editorial board of Political Science Quarterly. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He has chaired the American Political Science Task Force on “Difference and Inequality in Developing Societies.” He is the winner of the 1993 Theodore J. Lowi Award presented by the Policy Studies Organization for best article in the Policy Studies Journal. He has also served as a MacArthur Scholar, Senior Fellow at the American Institute of Indian Studies, and Fulbright Scholar. He received his PhD and MA in political science from the University of Chicago.
Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Before this position, he was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he 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. Kapur’s research has focused on five broad areas that examine the political and institutional determinants of economic development: international financial institutions; political and economic consequences of international and internal migration; the effects of market forces and urbanization on the well-being of socially marginalized groups in India; governance and public institutions; and higher education. His book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India (Princeton University Press) earned him a 2012 Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association, while The Other One Percent: Indians in America (with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh) was a Choice Outstanding Title of 2017. His other publications include The World Bank: Its First Half Century (with John Lewis and Richard Webb) and Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (co-authored with D. Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad). His latest edited works are Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta), Rethinking Public Institutions in India (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav), The Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India (with Milan Vaishnav) and Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance (with Madhav Khosla). Kapur holds a BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi, an MS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.
Erin McDonnell is the Kellogg Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, with concurrent appointments in the Keough School of Global Affairs and the Department of Africana Studies. Her research sits at the intersection of organizational, political, cultural, and economic sociology, examining how social organization and culture jointly shape state capacity, governance, and collective wellbeing. Her award-winning book, Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States (Princeton University Press, 2020), investigates how islands of high performance emerge within otherwise weak state administrations. McDonnell’s work has appeared in the American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Political Studies, and Socio-Economic Review, among others, and has been recognized with multiple national and international awards, including the Junior Theorist Award, the W. Richard Scott Article Award, and the Best Book Award from the European Group for Organizational Studies. Supported by the National Science Foundation, her current projects explore how bureaucratic professionalism and organizational design shape human well-being, and how public-sector organizations in the Global South achieve positive performance despite weak institutional environments. She has also served as an academic consultant for the World Bank and for national governments in Africa and Latin America, advising on strategies to strengthen public-sector performance and foster organizational cultures of effectiveness.
Aseema Sinha is the Wagener Chair of Comparative Politics and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California, USA. She previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC. Her research interests relate to the political economy of India, India-China comparisons, International Organizations, and the rise of India as an emerging power. She is an author of journal articles on India's markets and economic policies, foreign policy, trade policy, subnational comparisons in India, India and China, business collective action in India, Global Trade regimes, and public expenditure across Indian states. She has authored a book, The Regional Roots of Developmental Politics in India: A Divided Leviathan (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2005), which received the Joseph Elder Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Her book, titled Globalizing India: How Global Rules and Markets are Shaping India's Rise to Power, was published by Cambridge University Press (2016). Her articles have appeared in major journals such as Studies in Comparative International Development, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, International Affairs, British Journal of Political Science, World Development, Polity, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Business and Politics, Journal of Democracy, and India Review.
Steve Vogel is Director of the Political Economy Program, the Il Han New Professor of Asian Studies, and a Professor of Political Science and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in the political economy of advanced industrialized nations, especially Japan. His most recent book, entitled Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work (Oxford, 2018), argues that markets do not arise spontaneously but rather are crafted by individuals, firms, and most of all by governments. Thus “marketcraft” represents a core function of government comparable to statecraft. The book systematically reviews the implications of this argument, critiquing prevalent schools of thought and presenting lessons for policy. Vogel is also the author of Japan Remodeled: How Government and Industry Are Reforming Japanese Capitalism (Cornell, 2006) and co-editor (with Naazneen Barma) of The Political Economy Reader: Contending Perspectives and Contemporary Debates (Routledge, 2022). His first book, Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries (Cornell, 1996), won the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize. He edited his mother’s book, Suzanne Hall Vogel, The Japanese Family in Transition: From the Professional Housewife Ideal to the Dilemmas of Choice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), and a volume on U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World (Brookings, 2002). He won the Northern California Association of Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award in 2002, and the UC Berkeley Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors in 2005. He was awarded a Commendation from the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs for his contribution to Japanese studies in 2018. He has been a columnist for Newsweek-Japan and the Asahi Shimbun, and he has written extensively for the popular press. He has worked as a reporter for the Japan Times in Tokyo and as a freelance journalist in France. He has taught previously at the University of California, Irvine and Harvard University. He has a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Susan L. Ostermann is associate professor of global affairs and political science at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in Comparative International Development. While Ostermann’s research focuses mainly on regulatory compliance in South Asia, she is broadly interested in understanding laws and norms and how they change and interact. Her book "Capacity beyond Coercion: Regulatory Pragmatism and Compliance along the India-Nepal Border" (Oxford University Press) develops the concept of regulatory pragmatism to explain variation in strategies used by both the Nepali and Indian states to secure compliance with conservation, education and child labor regulations under challenging conditions. Her work has been published in Law & Society Review, Governance, Asian Survey, Studies in Comparative International Development, the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, Studies in Indian Politics and Law & Policy. Ostermann holds a Ph.D. from the Travers Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a law degree from Stanford Law School and worked for several years as a practicing litigator, focusing on class actions and intellectual property disputes.
Originally published at asia.nd.edu.