Gregory Ruf
Associate Professor | Undergraduate Program Director
HUMANITIES 1126
631-632-7690
- Biography
Biography: Gregory Ruf grew up near Binghamton, in upstate New York, and attended SUNY Cortland as an undergraduate, earning a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in History. He first went to China in 1982, when he spent his junior year on an exchange program in Beijing, part of the second cohort of American college students to study abroad in China during the early years of ‘Reform and Opening’ following the death of Chairman Mao. After college, Ruf won a scholarship for a year of advanced language study in Taipei, Taiwan. His travels throughout China led to an interest in cultural anthropology, which he pursued through graduate work at Columbia University (PhD 1994), and a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, before joining the faculty at Stony Brook. He has also taught at Drew University, Harvard University, and Wellesley College.
At Stony Brook, Greg Ruf served as the inaugural Undergraduate Director in Asian and Asian American Studies, as well as the Undergraduate Director for several other departments and programs, as inaugural Faculty Director for an interdisciplinary minor in Community Service Learning, as Program Director for six-week summer study tour of China, as Graduate Program Director in AAS, and multiple terms as Director of China Studies. He holds 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.
Ruf's research interests lay at the intersections of anthropology and history, particularly as they relate to rural development, social organization, and ecology. He is the author of Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-1991 (Stanford). He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar in China (Yunnan University), conducting fieldwork on water resource management in the Lancang/Mekong watershed. He is currently working on a book about a century of change in a rural Sichuan market town.
Professor Ruf’s course offerings focus mainly on culture, society, and history in China, and cover such topics as Society and Civilization in China; Ancient China; Environmental History of China; Cultural Diversity in China; and Family, Marriage, and Kinship in China. He also teaches the AAS Proseminar on research design for undergraduate seniors and entry-level grad students. Recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the College of Arts & Sciences Godfrey Teaching Excellence Award, Ruf long has been involved with Honors College and with the Freshman Seminars of the university’s Undergraduate Colleges program. He advises Honors students in several departments.
Ruf lives in a coastal community on Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and in a small fishing village in Maine on the Canadian border. An avid sailor and a competitive rower, when not at work he enjoys creative arts, spending time outdoors, beach-combing, and kayaking. Although fascinated by moss, lichen, fungi, and jellyfish, to characterize him as an amateur naturalist would be giving him too much credit.
- Publications
Selected Publications:
• Cadres & Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-91 (Stanford University, 1998)
• “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 University, 1999)
• "Reflections of the Field, from the Field," in Liu Xin (ed.), Reflections on the Anthropology of China (Berkeley: University of California, 2004)