Mary Gallagher

Mary E. Gallagher is a nonresident senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. 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 2008-20.

Her research focuses on Chinese politics, U.S.-China relations, and Chinese state-society relations, especially labor politics and labor law. 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, Gallagher has consulted with governments, international organizations, and corporations on China’s domestic politics, labor and workplace conditions, and urbanization policies.

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 1996-97 as a member of the Princeton-in-Asia program. In 2003-04, she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai. From 2022-24, 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.

She received her doctorate in politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her bachelor’s from Smith College in 1991. She is a board member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Affiliations:

• National Committee on US-China Relations, board member
• National Bureau for Asian Research, Chinese Language Fellowship Program, advisory council
• Princeton University Press, Princeton Series in Contemporary China Series, co-editor
• The Society for the Social Scientific Understanding of China, steering committee
• University of Michigan Press, China Understandings Today Series, co-editor