Mary E. Gallagher is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the Kenneth G. Lieberthal and Richard H. Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.
Gallagher received her Ph.D. in Politics in 2001 from Princeton University and her B.A. from Smith College in 1991. She was a foreign student in China in 1989 at Nanjing University. She also taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-1997. She was a Fulbright Research Scholar from 2003 to 2004 at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai. In 2012-2013, she was a Visiting Professor at the Koguan School of Law at Shanghai Jiaotong University.
Her most recent book is Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State (Cambridge University Press, 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).