Dennis Galvan

Dennis Galvan is Professor of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of Oregon, where he also serves as Dean and Vice Provost for the Division of Global Engagement. With a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley (1996) and a B.A. from Stanford (1987), Galvan has built an extensive academic career focused on institutional adaptation, political culture, and culturally sustainable development in the global south.

Galvan's educational background includes:

• Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1996
• B.A. from Stanford University in 1987

His research interests center on the politics of everyday creativity, particularly how ordinary people adaptively transform political, economic, and cultural institutions to suit their changing notions of political morality, heritage, and identity. Galvan examines how individuals engage in what he terms 'creative syncretism' - the process of dismantling and rearranging institutional rules of politics, economics, and culture to create locally meaningful and sustainable forms of development. His work draws on John Dewey's pragmatist deliberation, Michel de Certeau's everyday tactics, and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to document micro-politics of creating local, vernacular modernities, particularly in post-colonial settings.

Galvan's scholarly output includes the award-winning book 'The State Must Be Our Master of Fire: How Peasants Craft Culturally Sustainable Development in Senegal' (University of California Press, 2004), which won the 2005 Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association African Politics Conference Group. He has also co-edited 'Political Creativity: Reconfiguring Institutional Order and Change' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and 'Reconfiguring Institutions Across Time and Space: Syncretic Responses to Challenges of Political and Economic Transformation' (Palgrave Macmillan). His recent book project, 'Everyday Nation Building,' explores how ordinary people in Senegal and Indonesia creatively rework traditions of kinship and structures of kingship to establish informal bases for cooperation, tolerance, and national belonging.

His scholarly contributions have been recognized with numerous awards including the Thomas F. Herman Faculty Award for Distinguished Teaching (2008), University of Oregon's highest honor for teaching among tenured faculty, and the University of Florida Honors Program Professor of the Year Award (2000-01). His research has been supported by prestigious fellowships including a Fulbright Visiting Scholar position at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal (2009-10), and grants from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and US Department of Education.

Galvan has conducted extensive field research since 1986 in West Africa, primarily in a cluster of thirty villages in Senegal's Sine region, and since 1999 in Central Java, Indonesia. His work as a university administrator draws on these field experiences, recognizing university systems as fields of ongoing, improvisational rearrangement rather than rigid behavior-ordering machines. He serves on the Board of Trustees of WorldOregon and previously served on the International Policy Advisory Council of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (2014-2019), co-chairing from 2014-16.