Bob Eng was educated at Haverford College and Pomona College, where he graduated with a B.A. in mathematics. He then earned an M.A. in Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in history at the University of California at Berkeley. Bob has been teaching at the University of Redlands since 1980. Bob's research interests lie in the social, economic and demographic history of modern China and Japan. His book, Economic Imperialism in China: Silk Production and Exports, 1861-1932 (Berkeley 1986), focuses on the impact of Western imperialism on the peasant society and urban economy of China. His articles and book reviews have been published in leading academic journals including American Historical Review, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Late Imperial China, Modern Asian Studies, Modern China, and Pacific Affairs, as well as in edited volumes published in Australia and the People's Republic of China. The topics of his publications include the population history of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan, labor movements and women's collective action in 20th century China, and business enterprise in Shanghai and Guangzhou (Canton). He has also contributed numerous articles to The Asian American Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, and Colonialism: An International Social, Cultural, and Political Encyclopedia.

Bob has been the recipient of several national fellowships and awards: the Mellon Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the Summer Seminar for College Teachers Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars. He has been a research associate at the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University and a research fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California at Berkeley. He has also received an Outstanding Faculty Research Award at the University of Redlands.

Bob teaches survey courses on world history, East Asian civilizations and Asian-American history, intermediate and advanced courses on modern China, modern Japan, China since the Communist Revolution of 1949, and the Pacific Rim, and seminars in comparative history on such subjects as business and entrepreneurship and peasant economies and revolutions. In his first year seminars and May Term courses, Bob has made use of classical and contemporary literature and cinema as windows on Chinese civilization past and present. He is interested in multidisciplinary approaches and the use of multimedia and Internet resources in the learning and teaching of history.

Bob is a member of the WWW Virtual Library consortium, and the Webmaster of “East and Southeast Asia: An Annotated Directory of Internet Resources,” “Macau WWW Virtual Library,” and “A Quick and Dirty Guide to Installing and Using East Asian Languages under Microsoft Windows.”

Since 2006, Bob has been serving a 3-year term on the Board of Directors of ASIANetwork, a consortium of liberal arts colleges dedicated to the promotion of Asian Studies in the undergraduate curriculum. As chair of ASIANetwork's Publicity and Web Site Committee, he completely redesigned and is actively managing its Web site.

From the fall of 2007, Bob assumed the directorship of the University of Redlands Regional Center of the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), a joint initiative of the East-West Center and the University of Hawai‘i. Member institutions of the ASDP Association of Regional Centers “work closely with ASDP in supporting Asian studies on their own and other campuses in their area.”