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FACULTY BIOGRAPHIES -- Carole Gallaher

Carole Gallaher
Ph.D., University of Kentucky
B.A., Mary Washington College
E-mail: caroleg@american.edu
Phone: (202) 885-1827
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Carolyn Gallaher is a broadly trained political geographer. Her work blends insights from political economy and cultural studies and is focused on two substantive areas of inquiry—the role of paramilitaries in irregular warfare and the influence of the religious right in US foreign policy.

Professor Gallaher’s most recent book After the Peace: Loyalist Paramilitaries in Post-Accord Northern Ireland (Cornell University Press 2007) tracks the dynamics of Loyalist paramilitary violence since the 1998 peace agreement. Her first book, On the Fault Line: Race, Class, and the American Patriot Movement (Rowmand and Littlefield 2003), chronicles the rise of the militia movement in rural Kentucky. Professor Gallaher’s research on the religious right examines the rise of evangelical universities in the US, the influence of premillennial dispensationalist theology in US foreign policy, and the politics of missionary work among indigenous communities in Mexico. Her work has appeared in top Geography journals, including Space and Polity, Antipode, Society and Space, Bulletin of Latin American Research, and Social and Cultural Geography.

Professor Gallaher teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at AU. Her graduate courses include Conduct of Inquiry, a qualitative methods course for PhD students and Political Violence, a seminar for masters’ level students. She also teaches a Human Geography course for the university’s general education program. This fall Professor Gallaher is offering an honors’ colloquium, Guerillas, Insurgents and Paramilitaries. Professor Gallaher is also committed to experiential learning. In 1999 and 2000 she led field courses in Oaxaca Mexico and inn the spring of 2003 and 2004 she was the faculty sponsor for the University’s alternative spring break trip to Chiapas, Mexico.

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