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Dennis Galvan, Mentor
International Studies, Political Science

Demie Shiferaw, McNair Scholar

Dennis Galvan is Associate Professor of International Studies and Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996 and joined the UO faculty in 2001. Galvan's work centers on “comparative analysis of development, the politics of cultural identity, competing forms and structures of legitimation and social mobilization, and the search for locally meaningful and sustainable models of social change in the so-called ‘third world.’” His field research has been in West Africa and Indonesia and examines how ordinary non-Western peoples adapt markets, law, local government, and natural resource management systems when “traditional” cultures are incorporated into “modern” political and economic systems. Galvan’s publications include The State Must be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal, (UC Press, 2004); “Joking Kinship as a Syncretic Institution,” Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines (2006); and “The Social Reproduction of Community-based Development: Syncretism and Sustainability in a Senegalese Farmer’s Association,” Journal of Modern African Studies (2007).