Selina Gallo-Cruz, associate professor of sociology, is the latest Maxwell School faculty member to be named an O’Hanley Faculty Scholar. She was selected in recognition of her outstanding teaching and scholarship.

Gallo-Cruz will hold the title for three years and will receive financial support for her research and teaching.

The designation is made possible through the O’Hanley Endowed Fund, which was established by Maxwell Advisory Board Chairman and Syracuse University Trustee Ronald O’Hanley III, chairman and chief executive officer of State Street Global Advisors and a 1980 graduate of the Maxwell School with a B.A. in political science.

Gallo-Cruz is a senior research associate in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration, where she co-directs the advocacy and activism research team. She is also a research affiliate for the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Gallo-Cruz’s scholarly work has focused on gender, violence, non-violence, and social movements in a comparative context. She recently edited “Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence” (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and authored “Political Invisibility and Mobilization: Women Against State Violence in Argentina, Yugoslavia, and Liberia” (Routledge, 2021), which won the American Sociological Association’s Peace, War and Social Conflict section’s Outstanding Book Award. In 2021, she was honored as a Democracy Visiting Fellow with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School and was awarded the Fulbright-Tampere University Scholar Award. Her current research focuses on comparative policy and legislative conflicts over climate change and human trafficking.

Carol Faulkner, senior associate dean for academic affairs, says Gallo-Cruz enhances the Maxwell School’s emphasis on research with a public impact. Faulkner praises Gallo-Cruz as an “outstanding and internationally recognized scholar of social movements and policy change, who engages students around challenging issues facing the U.S. and the world.”

Prior to joining Maxwell, Gallo-Cruz taught at the College of the Holy Cross and Emory University.

By Mikayla Melo