University Professor at the Department of Anthroplogy of the University of Toronto, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), she is a specialist of sociocultural anthropology and of the South and Southeast Asia.
Her early research in Southeast Asia concerned urban cultural politics in Singapore. Since then she has focused on culture, economy, environment, and development in Indonesia’s upland regions. She has written about the rise of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples’ movement, land reform, rural class formation, struggles over the forests and conservation, community resource management, state-organized resettlement and the problems faced by people who are pushed off the land in contexts where they have little or no access to waged employment.
Her book "The Will to Improve" (Duke University Press, 2007) explores a century of interventions by colonial and contemporary officials, missionaries, development experts and activists. "Powers of Exclusion" (National University of Singapore Press, 2011) examines agrarian transition to see what happens to farmers’ access to land in the context of competing land uses (e.g. conservation, urban sprawl, plantation agriculture). Her prize-winning book "Land’s End" (Duke University Press, 2014) tracks the emergence of capitalist relations among indigenous highlanders when they enclosed their common land. "Plantation Life" (Duke University Press, 2014) explores the forms of social, political, cultural and economic life that emerge in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone.
Li, T. Commons, co-ops, and corporations: assembling Indonesia’s twenty-first century land reform. The Journal of Peasant Studies 1-27, 2021. DOI 10.1080/03066150.2021.1890718
Li, T. Epilogue: Customary Land Rights and Politics, 25 Years On, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 2020, 21 (1), 77-84
Li, T. Politics, Interrupted, Anthropological Theory, 2029, 19(1):29-53
