Her father was born in Italy as Sabino Piro Levis and was adopted as a child by the philosopher John Dewey and his wife Alice.
Members of the research team studied different aspects of contemporary social life in the town of Pare, East Java, known pseudonymously in their publications as Modjokuto.
She served as the dissertation adviser for many doctoral students, most notably Barack Obama's mother Ann Dunham, who entered the graduate program in 1972 after having lived in Indonesia with her second husband Lolo Soetoro for five years.
[7] After Dunham's death in 1995, Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper edited her dissertation for publication, which appeared in 2009 as Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.
[9] In addition to her fieldwork in Java, Dewey also studied the Māori people of New Zealand and the Javanese community in New Caledonia.