Dr. Paul K. Gellert is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He specializes in the political economy of development; natural resources, states, capital and peripheral development; comparative-historical sociology; and development theory. Regionally, he focuses on Asia, specifically Indonesia, where he has spent many years living and conducting research. During 2010-11 he is teaching under a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship at Paramadina University in Jakarta, Indonesia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin's Department of Sociology in 1998. He first had the opportunity to go to Indonesia with VIA (Volunteers in Asia). When he's not working, Paul likes to spend time with his wife and two children, cook & eat Italian and Indonesian food, drink really good coffee, and attempt to get in better shape by swimming or playing badminton and tennis.
Articles
Financialization, Shareholder Value, and the Transformation of Timberland Ownership in North America (with Andrew Gunnoe), Critical Sociology (2011)
In the last couple decades, significant portions of US timberlands previously held by vertically integrated...
Extractive Regimes: Toward a Better Understanding of Indonesian Development, Rural Sociology (2010)
This article proposes the concept of an extractive regime to understand Indonesia's developmental trajectory from...
Rival Transnational Networks, Domestic Politics, and Indonesian Timber, Journal of Contemporary Asia (2010)
Scholars interested in the promotion of ‘‘good governance’’ and those interested in transnational advocacy networks...
People, Place and Time: How Structural Fieldwork Helps World-Systems Analysis (with Jon Shefner), Journal of World-Systems Research (2009)
Some of the most insightful work in the political economy of the world-system area has...
From Managed to Free(r) Markets: Transnational and Regional Governance of Asian Timber, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2007)
On the basis of research conducted in Indonesia, the author investigates a key transition in...
Contributions to Books
The Politics of Governance of Indonesia’s Forest Industries: Progress and Regress in a Neo-liberal Age, Governance and the Depoliticisation of Development (2009)
What’s New with the Old?: Scalar Dialectics and the Reorganization of Indonesia’s Timber Industry, Taking Southeast Asia to Market: Commodities,Nature, and People in the Neoliberal Age (2008)
Reviews
Review of Space, Oil and Capital by Mazen Labban. Routledge Press, 2008. Economic Geography 86(1): 113-114 (2010)
[Extract] Conventional geopolitical perspectives on oil posit that the world's total oil supplies have been...
Review of The Ecological Revolution by John Bellamy Foster . Monthly Review Press, 2009. in Contemporary Sociology. Vol. 39, 4, pp. 444-445 (2010)
[Extract] John Bellamy Foster offers a dire picture of the ecological crisis facing us. He...
Review of Community-Driven Regulation: Balancing Development and the Environment in Vietnam by Dara O’Rourke, American Journal of Sociology (2005)
Book Review Community‐Driven Regulation: Balancing Development and Environment in Vietnam. By Dara O’Rourke. Cambridge, Mass.:...