James Robert Rush is an American historian, writer, editor, researcher, essayist, consultant and professor. Rush studied modern Southeast Asian history at Yale University. Rush obtained a PhD degree from Yale University in 1977. As a public historian, Rush is an expert on modern Southeast Asia. As an educator, Rush is an associate professor of history at the Department of History of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. He is the Director of Arizona State University's Program for Southeast Asian Studies. He is also the Associate Chair of the History Department of the university. As a consultant, Rush worked with The Asia Society, El Colegio de México, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.[1] As a researcher, Rush's research in Indonesia was under a Fulbright Senior Scholarship Program.[1]
Rush's works are related to issues discussing colonialism and religion in Indonesia during the nineteenth and the twentieth century. From 1987, Rush was also the leader of the biography project of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation in Manila, Philippines. In connection with the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation's biography project, Rush conducted interviews with more than one hundred awardees, and from 1991 to 2006 Rush edited six volumes of biographical essays. Rush's own essays for the biographical project of the Ramon Magsaysay Award series include the biographies of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Abdurrahman Wahid, Bienvenido Lumbera, Ravi Shankar, Veditantirige Ediriwira Sarachchandra, and Fei Xiaotong.[1] The titles of Rush's books include the following: