Steven Wilkinson Session Overview

Steven I. Wilkinson is Nilekani Professor of India and South Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Yale University, where he is also Henry R. Luce Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. In addition he serves as Vice Provost for Global Strategy. From 2021-22, he served as Acting Dean of Social Science. Before coming to Yale, he taught at the University of Chicago and at Duke University. He has worked on political conflict in India, and his first book on that topic, Votes and Violence (Cambridge, 2004), won the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book on Politics, Government and International Affairs. He is also interested in corruption in politics, and co-edited the book Patrons, Clients or Politics: Patterns of Political Accountability and Competition (Cambridge, 2007) with Herbert Kitschelt. His most recent book is Army and Nation, which came out in January 2015 from Harvard University Press (Permanent Black in South Asia), and examines India’s success in managing the imbalanced colonial army it inherited in 1947. He is currently working with Saumitra Jha (Stanford GSB) on a book on War and Political Change, and with Sushant Singh (CPR) on a new book on India’s changing defence structure. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.