Graduate Program - Comparative Politics

Area Studies Resources

Africa -- The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies provides pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships for research related to Africa and African-Americans.

Latin America—the Latin American Studies program lists 25 associated faculty, and together with the Casa Bolivar Spanish language house sponsors regional speakers and events.

South Asia -- The Center for South Asian Studies is an interdisciplinary center that coordinates and promotes the study of South Asia- its diverse peoples, languages, cultures, religions and history. It coordinates academic studies, outreach programs, and research relating to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. The Center has 21 core faculty members and 20 Associate faculty. Each semester they teach more than 50 courses on aspects of South Asian language, culture, politics, and society. Funding secured by the Center has helped Alderman library become one of the premier depositories for research materials on South Asia. This year the Center provided more than $300,000 in graduate student support through its Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships.

East Asia — The Asian and Middle Eastern Languages Department offers language instruction in Chinese and Japanese. In addition, the East Asia Center organizes a visiting speakers series, provides travel grants, and serves as a forum for interdisciplinary interaction with faculty in history (Jian Chen and Bradley Reed on China, Gary Allinson on Japan), economics (Bruce Reynolds on Japan and China), anthropology (John Shepherd on China), sociology (Ellen Fuller on Japan), and other related disciplines.

Middle East—The program in Middle East Studies brings together students and faculty with a variety of interests focused on the Middle East, and sponsors talks and activities.

Europe — The University of Virginia is an associate member institution of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), the pre-eminent pan-European association for the study of European politics. Any individual graduate student enrolled at U.Va., like any faculty member teaching at U.Va., enjoys numerous benefits from our institution’s membership in the ECPR. Among other benefits: we do not pay conference fees for participating in the annual Joint Sessions of ECPR Workshops (held in April); we can participate in the annual Research Sessions (held in the Autumn), with subsidies for travel and local costs paid by the ECPR; we pay reduced rates in ECPR-sponsored summer schools, which include the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis, the European Summer School on Comparative Politics, and the Political Parties Summer School. Beyond the substantial benefits that this Department’s graduate students derive from the ECPR, it is also important to emphasize that many faculty members in the Department have expertise in European politics, broadly defined: Alexander, Cirtautas, Lynch, Mershon, Savage, and Schwartz among the comparativists; and Copeland, Gould, Legro, Owen, and Smith among the IR faculty. Moreover, David O’Brien has held a Fulbright in Italy, Sidney Milkis is interested in European influences on the American founding, and Joshua Dienstag and Stephen White examine continental political theory.