Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures and Professor in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion. She is currently the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies. She also holds an appointment at the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University. Since 2013 she has been working to establish the field of Indonesian Studies in Israel and to foster academic collaboration and exchange with scholars in this field, in Indonesia and elsewhere.

Prof. Ricci received her Ph.D. from the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 2006 and has since studied and worked in Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia. She is the author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions Award,  the Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, and the Polonsky Prize) and Banishment and Belonging: exile and diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She also edited  Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (University of Hawaii Press, 2016, winner of the ICAS Best Edited Volume Accolade in the Humanities Award), and co-edited (with Jan van der Putten) Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories (St. Jerome, 2011) and (with Greg Fealy) Contentious Belonging: The Place of Minorities in Indonesia (ISEAS, 2019).