Senior Lecturer, Department of International Affairs
Director, Security Leadership Program
Maryann E. Gallagher is the Director of the Richard B. Russell Security Leadership Program (SLP) at the University of Georgia’s Benson-Bertsch Center for International Trade and Security and a senior lecturer in the Department of International Affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA). She is also an affiliate faculty member in UGA’s Institute for Women’s Studies.
Dr. Gallagher’s research interests include American foreign policy, gender in international relations, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. She teaches upper-level courses on American Foreign Policy, Decision Making in International Relations, Women & World Politics, and War & Gender. In addition, she teaches the first-semester practicum course and supervises the research semester for students in the SLP. Her research has been published in academic journals including Foreign Policy Analysis, Political Science Quarterly, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
Dr. Gallagher’s dedication to students and commitment to excellent teaching has been recognized across UGA’s campus. Most recently she was awarded UGA’s Morehead Honors College’s 2026 Morehead/Bullock Outstanding Honors Teaching Award and was the 2025 recipient of the University of Georgia Award for Excellence in Teaching. In previous years she received SPIA’s Excellence in Teaching Award (for non-tenure track faculty), Morehead Honors College’s J. Hatten Howard III Honors Teaching Award, and the Department of International Affairs Award for Teaching Excellence. She is a member of the 2026-2027 Service Learning Fellows program and participated in the 2026 inaugural Creative Engagement Wing Fellows program. In 2022 she participated in UGA’s Center for Teaching and Learning’s Active Learning Summer Institute and was a member of the 2021-2022 Writing Fellows cohort. She has served on the selection committee of UGA’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Office of the Vice President for Instruction’s Active Learning Advisory Committee, and the Department of International Affairs’ Curriculum Committee. Finally, Dr. Gallagher is the faculty organizer of SPIA’s annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium. This all-day event brings together members of the SPIA community to celebrate the research experiences of SPIA’s outstanding undergraduate students and the faculty who facilitate their work.
Dr. Gallagher received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Emory University and her B.A. from Drew University. Prior to joining the faculty at UGA in 2014, she was an assistant professor at DePauw University.
