About me
Emeritus Professor James Warren is an internationally recognized award winning ethno- and social historian who has conducted research in the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan for over four decades. He has held positions at the Australian National University, Yale University, Murdoch University, and, as a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University and the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He has been awarded grants by the Social Science Research Council, the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and the Australia Research Council and is a Fellow of The Australian Academy of the Humanities. Professor Warren has a number of major publications and received both national and international awards for his outstanding contributions in his fields. He currently coordinates two large multi-disciplinary Australia Research Council Projects concerned with the environmental history of the Indian Ocean World.
For over fifty years a passion for a forgotten past of ordinary people who have stood outside history and the recovery of a whole set of social relations have been a central preoccupation running through my research, writing and teaching. This approach to writing Southeast Asian History in an ethnographic grain has always been context-sensitive with a strong cultural-ecological orientation. The themes identified and addressed in my books, whether focussing on state formation, slavery, ethnicity, migration and urbanization, prostitution, and suicide are all trans-historical and trans-cultural. My current research on the environment –human nexus concerning the impact of cyclonic storms on the Philippines over five centuries, extends my methodology and research to the history of environmental change in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world . This interdisciplinary approach in diversity of method and objects of analyses in the writing and interpretation of Southeast Asian History has enabled me to render a portrait of Southeast Asians living in a complexly textured world of exceptional natural forces, large power constellations, intimate social relations and deep moral dilemmas.
My contribution to this field began in 1967 documenting the displacement of a maritime nomadic people and the destruction of their environment in North Borneo. My most important contributions over four decades are a series of strongly researched histories. Each breaks new ground in the location and use of sources and interdisciplinary approaches to problem and method. In each I have also drawn attention to a neglected historical phenomena. My current research on the environment –human nexus concerning the impact of cyclonic storms in the Philippines over five centuries, extends my methodology and research to the history of environmental change in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world . Since 2010, I have been leading a team of international scholars under the auspices of a series of Australia Research Council Grants, both Discovery and Linkage, aligned with the Mc Gill University's Indian Ocean World Centre’s ground breaking project ‘The Indian Ocean World: The Making of the First Global Economy in the context of Human –Environment Interaction’, sponsored by the Canadian Government’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. I am Chief Investigator and Team Leader on this ground breaking collaborative project. My associated ARC-funded Projects, investigating the impact of climate–related and other natural hazards on the economy, society and history of SE Asia since the 10th Century, represents a crucial Australian step in the global collaboration led by Professor Gwyn Campbell at McGill University. The project also forms the basis of the Australian contribution to the evolving network of collaboration , including Japan-Australia-Canada: Interdisciplinary Collaboration for a New Global Approach to the Humanities, which involves cooperation between the Asia Research Centre/Indo-Pacific Research Centre at Murdoch University, the IOWC at McGill University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, in the areas of global history, global environmental history, and IOW history (see http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/jaac.)
Since 2009, I have published 18 articles about the history of climate and weather in the Philippines over five centuries, and have completed a major book (23 chapters) on the role and impacts of the typhoon( cyclonic storms) on Philippine society and history.
During my career I have published 9 books and over 140 referred book chapters, articles and reviews, in leading journals /publishing houses.