Welcome to the Department of Government and Politics (GVPT) at the University of Maryland. With more than 30 tenured and tenure-track faculty, 1,000 undergraduate majors, and 100 graduate students, we are one of the largest departments in the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS).
Our faculty teach and conduct research in all of the major fields in our discipline, including American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, political economy, and formal theory and methods. Realizing that many of the key problems we face have a significant political component, our faculty and students study a variety of issues with real-world policy implications ranging from civil wars and ethnic conflict to environmental politics, partisan polarization, and inequality. Our faculty do fieldwork around the world, conduct surveys (sometimes with the Washington Post), run simulations, and conduct experiments. We have a dynamic PhD program with 70 students, and we have two masters programs, the M.S. in Applied Political Analytics (APAN) and the M.A. in International Relations (MAIR). We house two major centers, the Center for International Development and Conflict Management and the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement. GVPT is also the home for the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development and the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science.
Our undergraduate program is designed to provide students with the substantive knowledge, the analytical skills, and the professional experience necessary to go into the world and address organizational and societal problems at the local, national, and international levels. We consistently foster a multi-disciplinary approach to problem-solving, and our majors often double major (or minor) in other departments in BSOS and across the campus. Our commitment to interdisciplinary study and problem-solving extends to support for the largest undergraduate minor in BSOS (the Minor in International Development and Conflict Management) and one of the largest concentrations in the Environmental Science and Policy (ENSP) major. We also offer a formal concentration in international relations, and a new Bachelor of Science program, which both leverage our strengths in methodology and international relations in ways that prepare our graduates for real-world experiences. We offer an increasing number of courses focused on methodological skills, and we have an array of internship and undergraduate research programs, including the fast-growing Maryland Internship Program.
We consistently produce some of the most outstanding graduates at the university. They regularly win prestigious scholarships and fellowships such as Critical Language Scholarships and Boren Fellowships. Recent GVPT undergraduate alumni have gone on to positions in the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Congress, Fannie Mae, Maryland General Assembly, Northrop Grumman, Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., EY, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. Many of our graduates pursue law degrees, masters degrees in public policy or international affairs, MBAs, or Ph.D.s in political science; in recent years we have placed our students at some of the most prestigious graduate programs in the country.
Recent PhD alumni from GVPT have taken tenure-track positions at Towson University, Holy Cross College, Georgetown University, Graduate Institute of National Development, National Taiwan University, University of Mary Washington, and University of Maryland Baltimore County. They have also taken positions at a variety of organizations such as Meta, Twitter, RAND, and Brookings Institute.
For a world facing an array of serious policy problems, we prepare our students to “be the solution." Please consider joining us.
Sincerely,
Antoine Banks
Chair, Department of Government and Politics
