Robin Fox

Robin Fox, anthropologist, poet and essayist, is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers University where in 1967 he founded the Department of Anthropology, recently ranked in the top ten in the country.

Born in 1934 in the UK, he was educated at the London School of Economics, Harvard and Stanford, and did fieldwork among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, Irish crofters on Tory Island, and monkey societies in Bermuda and the Caribbean. For 12 years he was Director of Research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation with Lionel Tiger, with whom he wrote The Imperial Animal. They funded and encouraged the early work in biosocial science, later known as sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.

He has written and edited 17 books, including The Red Lamp of Incest, The Tory Islanders and Kinship and Marriage, the most widely read anthropology text in the world. His poems and secular prose (mostly satirical) appear in The Passionate Mind, reflecting his interest in sailing, bullfighting, language, music and college football. The story of his first forty years appeared as Participant Observer and his latest book is The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard UP 2011.) A festschrift in his honor will be published in 2012, tentatively titled The Last Anthropologist: Essays on Human Nature and Society for Robin Fox, edited by Michael Egan (Edwin Mellen Press.)

He is currently working on Gulf Coast archaeology, translations of Ovid, and Shakespeare’s education. www.robinfoxbooks.com.