Professor Jeffrey is currently the Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at ANU. He was educated at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada (1967) and worked as a journalist on the Daily Colonist in Victoria, BC and then taught school in Chandigarh in north India from 1967-9 before doing a doctorate in modern Indian history at Sussex. He came to the ANU as a research fellow from 1973-8 and taught in the Politics Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne from 1979-2005.

He has written about both Punjab in the north and Kerala in the south and has most recently worked on the Indian newspaper industry and on Indian media more generally. His research in matrilineal societies, particularly in Kerala in south India, arose from his doctoral thesis, later published as The Decline of Nayar Dominance. His work as a teacher in Punjab, on the Khalistan secessionist movement in 1981 resulted in What's Happening to India? His current project is an account of India in the second half of the twentieth century, based on portraits of the six years in which the great Kumbh mela was held, provisionally entitled "Slices of India".

He has been on the advisory board of the Asia Education Foundation (AEF) since its inception in 1992 and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia.

Robin Jeffrey is currently Convener of the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.