Ellen Judd’s research is concentrated in the anthropology of contemporary China, and particularly in the areas of rural ethnography, political economy, gender and relatedness, cultural production, political anthropology and mutuality. She was educated at Queen’s University at Kingston, the University of British Columbia Fudan University in Shanghai, Beijing University and the University of Cambridge. In 2006 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2012-13 she served as President of the Canadian Anthropology Society.

Ellen Judd was one of the earliest foreign students in China when universities reopened toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, studying in Beijing and Shanghai on a Canada-China Exchange Scholarship from 1974 to 1977. Her early work was concentrated on cultural production and directed change in Chinese performing arts as precursors to and during the Cultural Revolution, and later on the revival of traditional ritual opera in the 1980s and 1990s. She turned to ethnographic research in rural China when this became open to international researchers in the 1980s, initially exploring the household and community implications of China’s post-Cultural Revolution rural economic reform. Subsequently she continued this work with a longitudinal study of the Chinese women’s movement’s indigenous responses and innovations during this transition. She has also conducted applied anthropology in agricultural development and in building public health capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS in China. Beginning in 2003, Ellen Judd moved her research focus from Shandong to Sichuan and Chongqing to conduct field research on the political economy and social implications of large-scale migration from rural west China to urban and coastal regions. This research explored multiple dimensions of gender and mobility and the effects of migration on persons at risk (including the elderly, disabled, widowed and orphaned) remaining in the countryside. Examining state policies of social and economic security for rural residents and understanding rural residents’ practices and responses to these policies are central elements in this project. This field work has been extended to explorations of emergent health care initiatives for translocal west China migrants and their families in metropolitan centres. Her recent thematic research direction includes cross-cultural examination of practices of inclusion/exclusion, cooperation and mutuality.