Mary E. Gallagher is the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the John L Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
She received her Ph.D. in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991. Her research focuses on Chinese politics, US-China Relations, and Chinese state-society relations, especially labor politics and labor law. She was previously the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights at the University of Michigan and the director of the International Institute. She was the director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies from 2008-2020.
Dr. Gallagher’s most recent book is Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers and the State, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. She is also the author or editor of several other books, including Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton 2005), Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (Cambridge 2011), From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (Cornell 2011), and Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods, and Field Strategies (Cambridge 2010). In addition to her academic research, Dr. Gallagher has consulted with governments, international organizations, and corporations on China’s domestic politics, labor and workplace conditions, and urbanization policies.
Dr. Gallagher was a foreign student in China in the fall of 1989 at Nanjing University at the Duke-in-China Program. She taught at Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-1997 as a member of the Princeton-in-Asia program. In 2003-2004, she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai. From 2022-24, Dr. Gallagher was a Fulbright Global Scholar on a research project that examines how economic engagement with China has affected domestic public opinion toward globalization in Germany, the United States, Korea, and Japan.