Rate My Professor Jim Fox

James J. Fox is a Professor in the State, Society and Governance program at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, where he has been a Professorial Fellow/Professor since 1975. Educated as a Rhodes Scholar at Harvard University (AB, 1962) and Oxford University (BLitt, 1965; DPhil, 1968), he previously served as Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University (1969-1975). He has taught at Cornell University, Duke University, the University of Chicago, Leiden University, Bielefeld University, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. At ANU, Fox directed the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies from 1998 to 2006. His extensive visiting appointments include Senior Visiting Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden (1996), Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (2001), Visiting Professor on the Australian Chair at Harvard University (2006-2007), and Jensen Memorial Lecturer at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt (2007).

Fox's academic interests encompass the history and anthropology of Indonesia and East Timor, focusing on Java, Roti, Timor, and eastern Indonesia; rural development and resource management; social organisation and symbolic systems; linguistic anthropology; and comparative Austronesian ethnology. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in these areas and contributed to projects on integrated forest and land fire management, fisheries, and the semantics of canonical parallelism in Indonesia. A Foreign Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, Fox has authored and edited numerous influential works, including Harvest of the Palm: Ecological Change in Eastern Indonesia (1977), The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia (1980), To Speak in Pairs: Essays on the Ritual Languages of Eastern Indonesia (1988), Inside Austronesian Houses: Perspectives on Domestic Designs for Living (1993), Origins, Ancestry and Alliance: Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography (1996), The Austronesians: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (1995), Austronesian Paths and Journeys (2021), and A Research Note on Austronesian Relationship Terminologies With and Without Relative Age Categories (2023).