Robin Fox

Robin Fox

Robin Fox is currently University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University.

Professor Fox was born in Yorkshire and educated at the London School of Economics and Harvard University, with post-doctoral work at Stanford Medical School. He did fieldwork in New Mexico and Donegal and from 1959 to 1967 taught at the universities of Exeter and London.

In 1967 he published Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective , which is still probably the world’s most widely read anthropological text. In the same year he went to Rutgers to found a department of Anthropology and has been there ever since.

In 1970 he published The Imperial Animal, in collaboration with his colleague (and now fellow SIRC Advisor) Lionel Tiger. This was one of the earliest attempts to introduce ethological ideas into the social sciences.

Robin Fox is also the author of: Encounter with Anthropology ; The Red Lamp of Incest: An Enquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society ; Violent Imagination ; The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality; The Challenge of Anthropology: Old Encounters and New Excursions ; Reproduction and Succession: Studies in Anthropology, Law, and Society ; Conjectures and Confrontations: Science, Evolution, Social Concern ; Keresan Bridge, The: A Problem in Pueblo Ethnology ; The Tory Islanders — and editor of Biosocial Anthropology and, with Jacques Mehler, Neonate Cognition: Beyond the Buzzing, Blooming Confusion .

His most recent books are The Passionate Mind: Sources of Destruction and Creativity , 1999 and Participant Observer: A Memoir of a Transatlantic Life , 2004.

In 1984, Rutgers made Robin Fox a University Professor, the highest honour it can confer on a faculty member. In 1997, the University of Ulster awarded him an honorary D.Sc. for ‘distinguished contributions to Irish studies and anthropology’.

Robin Fox has been a highly valued advisor to the Directors of the Social Issues Research Centre for many years, and is centrally involved, with the other members of our Advisory Panel, in guiding the work of SIRC.

To visit Robin's website please click here.