Professor Robert Cribb FAHA
Australian National University
robert.cribb@anu.edu.au
Qualifications: BA, PhD
Year Elected to the Academy: 2005
Discipline: History, Asian Studies
Expertise: Indonesian, Dutch Language, Drawing Maps

Robert Cribb grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and spent much time as a child wandering the bush and the Barrier Reef with his botanist parents. After completing his undergraduate studies in Asian History at the University of Queensland, he took his PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, with a thesis on Jakarta during the Indonesian revolution, 1945-49. After graduating, he taught at Griffith University and at the University of Queensland (both in Brisbane) and as a guest lecturer at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. He held research positions at the Australian National University, the Netherlands Institute for Advance Study and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, where he was also director for two years. He re-joined the Australian National University at the beginning of 2003.  Robert Cribb's research interests focus mainly on Indonesia, though he has some interest in other parts of Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia and Burma/Myanmar) and in Inner Asia. The themes of his research are: mass violence and crime; national identity; environmental politics; and historical geography.