Holly High
researcher

Holly High (born 1976) is an Australian anthropologist specialising in the ethnography of socialist Laos. She is an associate professor at Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.
Biography
High was born in 1976 near Nimbin, New South Wales.
High conducted fieldwork in Laos, including language learning and documenting a bird flu outbreak. She was a research fellow at the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies (2005–2006) and at Clare Hall, Cambridge from 2010, later becoming a Life Member. She was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award in 2012 and an ARC Future Fellowship in 2020. In 2021 she joined Deakin University.
Research
High's research focuses on the ethnography of socialism in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, with particular attention to gender, reproductive health, and policy. Reviewer Ian G. Baird of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has argued that High was the first scholar to seriously challenge the characterisation of Laos as postsocialist. She is also a public advocate for the discipline of anthropology, appearing regularly on podcasts and in interviews to discuss Lao politics and society.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q97595099. VIAF identifies the subject as 204020227. The Library of Congress control number is n2013209929. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 2005, 2006 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Holly High” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.