Johannes Fabian received his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago and is professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Previously, he taught at Northwestern and Wesleyan Universities and at the National University of Zaire in Lubumbashi. He was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, and visiting Theordor-Heuss Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York.

He did research on religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba mining region of Zaire (1966-7, 1972-4, 1985, 1986). In his theoretical and critical work, he addressed questions of epistemology and of the history of anthropology, especially in his Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (1983).

His books include History from Below (1990), Power and Performance (1990), Language and Colonial Power (1986, 1991), a collection of his critical essays, Time and the Work of Anthropology (1991), Remembering the Present. Painting and Popular History in Zaire (1996), Moments of Freedom. Anthropology and Popular culture (1998), and Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (2000) Anthropology with an Attitude, a collection of essays, was published in 2001.