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Biography:
Ruf was raised in upstate New York and attended SUNY Cortland as an undergraduate,
where he majored in Political Science. He spent 1982-83 as an exchange student in
Beijing, and then won a scholarship for a year of advanced language study in Taiwan.
He received his Ph.D in 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), Ruf was also awarded
a Fulbright Research Fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at Yunnan University’s Department
of Anthropology (2001-02). He has taught at Drew University, Harvard University, and
Wellesley College. At Stony Brook, Ruf served as inaugural Director of Undergraduate
Studies in AAS, and is currently Director of the China Studies (CNS) program; previously,
he also served as inaugural Faculty Director of the Community Service Learning (CSL)
Program, an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor.
Professor Ruf's interests include the intersections of anthropology and history, specifically
in areas relating to politics and law, rural development, social ecology and environmental
management, social organization and gender, as well as theoretical and methodological
issues in ethnographic research and 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.
Professor Ruf is an Associate Professor holding a joint appointment in Asian and Asian
American Studies and Anthropology, and is part of the graduate faculty in the Interdisciplinary
Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences (
http://www.anat.stonybrook.edu/IDPAS/). Ruf teaches courses on 1) Revolutionary China; 2) Environmental History of China;
3) Ancient China; 4) Family, Marriage, and Kinship in China; 5) Ethnicity and Ecology
in China; and 6) the China Studies seminar on ancient Chinese classical texts. In
2009, he led a month-long study tour that took students through six different provinces
of China.
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