Robin Jeffrey

Professor Robin Jeffrey is a researcher and author with expertise in Indian politics, culture and media.

Jeffrey’s most recent book, written with his colleague Assa Doron, is The Great Indian Phone Book. The book is published in India under the title of Cell Phone Nation, and analyses the expansion of mobile telephone and its implications for society, politics and economics.

He is a co-editor of Being Muslim in South Asia, a collection under contract to Oxford University Press to be published in 2013, and a co-editor of Mughals and Mandarins, studies of the Chinese and Indian media by analysts and practitioners.

His long-term work focuses on a book called Slices of India, a history of India in the second half of the 20th century based around the years of the great Kumbh Mela in Allahabad.

Professor Jeffrey has written about Kerala, Punjab and Indian media. A third edition of India’s Newspaper Revolution was published in 2010.

He first lived in India as a school teacher in Chandigarh from 1967 to 1969 and has lived for six years in India between 1967 and 2010. He has published a number of books and contributes regularly to policy papers, reports and journals.

Professor Jeffrey completed a doctorate in Indian history at Sussex University in the United Kingdom in 1973. He taught for 25 years in the Politics Program at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, and worked twice at the Australian National University in Canberra.