Professor Ruf is an Associate Professor holding a joint appointment in Anthropology and Asian and Asian American Studies, and part of the graduate faculty in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences (http://gibbon.anat.sunysb.edu/IDPAS/).
He received his Ph.D is Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (1994), where he also earned a Certificate of Specialization in Modern China from Columbia’s East Asian Institute (1989). A past recipient of the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research (1994-95), he was also awarded a Fulbright Research Fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at Yunnan University’s Department of Anthropology (2001-02), and has also taught at Drew University, Harvard University, and at Wellesley College. At Stony Brook, Professor Ruf has served formerly as Faculty Director of the China Studies (CNS) Program, and as Director of Undergraduate Studies in AAS. He was also the inaugural Faculty Director of the Community Service Learning (CSL) Program, an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor.
Professor Ruf's interests include anthropology and history, politics and law, rural development, social ecology and environmental management, social organization and gender, as well as theoretical and methodological issues in historiography and ethnographic writing. His research focuses on historical processes in the political ecology of agrarian states, particularly the social and cultural context of human behavioral interaction with the environment. His recent work has focused on water resources and environment management in China.
Selected Publications:
Cadres & Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-91 (Stanford).
“Collective Enterprise and Property Rights in a Sichuan Village: The Rise and Decline of Managerial Corporatism,” in Oi & Walder (eds.), Property Rights and Economic Reform in China (Stanford).
"Reflections of the Field, from the Field," in Liu Xin (ed.), Reflections on the Anthropology of China (California).
Review of Judith Shapiro’s Mao’s War Against Nature in the Web-based Journal of Political Ecology: http://www.library.arizona.edu/ej/jpe/volume_8/1101ruf.html
