Professor of History Emeritus
Arizona State University

Colonialism, religion, biography, and current affairs in Southeast Asia

James Rush was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malaysia and subsequently studied modern Southeast Asian history at Yale University, where he received his PhD in 1977. His work explores issues of colonialism and religion in 19th and 20th century Indonesia and includes the books Opium to Java: Revenue Farming and Chinese Enterprise in Colonial Indonesia, 1860-1910, Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia,  and Southeast Asia: A Very Short Introduction in the Oxford Series. Other books include The Last Tree: Reclaiming the Environment in Tropical Asia, and Java: A Traveller's Anthology. As a public historian, Rush led the biography project of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (Philippines) from 1987 to 2008, conducting oral-history interviews with over one hundred Magsaysay Awardees and editing seven volumes of biographical essays (1989-2008). His own essays in the series include forty subjects from East, South, and Southeast Asia, among them Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Abdurrahman Wahid, Bienvenido Lumbera, Ravi Shankar, V.E. Sarachchandra, and Fei Xiaotong.

At Arizona State University, Rush taught lower-division cross-disciplinary courses such as "Introduction to Asia" and "Introduction to Southeast Asia" as well as the upper-division courses "Modern Southeast Asia" and "South, Southeast, and East Asia in the Global Matrix." Other upper-division and graduate courses addressed the Vietnam War, the American Philippines (1898-1946), Asia in Western fiction, comparative colonialism, and Communism and the Cold War. He is now retired.

Rush served as Interim Director of ASU’s Center for Asian Research from July 2018 through December 2019 and earlier served as Director of ASU’s Program for Southeast Asian Studies. He has been consultant to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Asia Society, and El Colegio de Mexico.