Mary Elizabeth Gallagher

Mary E. Gallagher is the Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights Professor at the University of Michigan where she is also 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. 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.
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 2021-23, Dr. Gallagher will be a Fulbright Global Scholar on a new research project that examines how economic engagement with China has affected domestic public opinion toward globalization. This project involves research in the United States, Germany, South Korea, and Japan.