The Graduate Program in Development (GPD) is an interdisciplinary initiative sponsored by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. GPD furthers multi-disciplinary perspectives on development through a range of activities: notably seminars, workshops, methods training and graduate fellowships and summer funding opportunities.
Graduate Program in Development (GPD)
Who We Are
At its core the Graduate Program in Development (GPD) is a community of scholars with a shared curiosity around, and a commitment to, exploring questions of development from diverse disciplinary perspectives.
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What We Do
GPD furthers multi-disciplinary perspectives on development through a range of activities: notably seminars, workshops, methods training and graduate fellowships and summer funding opportunities.
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Attend An Event
We host a variety of events, from our “What I am thinking now” sessions in which community members share their research, to our annual joint conference on Development with MIT to “Behind the scenes” discussion sessions with speakers as well as lectures and GPD training modules.
Events listing
Recent News
Anindita Adhikari, who earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University in 2024, found the dialogues and debates she engaged in about global challenges across traditional academic disciplinary barriers through Watson's Graduate Program in Development have made her a better researcher and colleague.
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Benjamin Bradlow, an alumnus of Watson's Graduate Program in Development (GPD), was recently awarded a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Azrieli Global Scholars fellowship. Now an assistant professor at Princeton, his research focuses on the politics of urban inequality and the perils of the transition to a “green” economy in the Global South.
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News from Watson
Graduate Program in Development fosters dialogue across disciplines
The Watson Institute's Graduate Program in Development (GPD) brings together Brown University scholars from a range of departments to think together around questions of development in ways that build on but move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.
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