He completed a PhD at UCLA in 1992, followed by a post-doc at Florida Atlantic University. He previously taught at Victoria University of Wellington (becoming Professor and Co-Director of its Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research). His research is in cross-cultural, social, and political psychology, with a specialization in social representations of history and their relationship to identity, prejudice, and international relations. James has 170 refereed publications that have been cited over 6000 times (H-index = 44 according to GoogleScholar). He calls the Asian Association of Social Psychology (