He earned his PhD in 1982 at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), under the direction of Mary Boyce, with a dissertation entitled "Zoroastrianism in Armenia".
Soon after finishing his PhD he returned to New York City and taught at Columbia University in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELAC).
He subsequently moved to Israel to become a Lady Davis Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the recommendation and invitation of the scholar Michael E. Stone.
Russell has taught and lectured in Armenia, India, and Iran and at the Oriental Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Saint Petersburg State University.
In 1993, Russell was appointed to the Mashtots Chair in Armenian Studies in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department at Harvard University, a post which he occupied until his retirement in 2016.
[12] In his speech at the conference "Rethinking Armenian Studies: Past, Present, and Future" on October 4, 2002, at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, Russell cautioned the audience against the "conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and ultra-nationalist pseudo-science [which] have come increasingly into the mainstream of Armenology in the Armenian Republic" and which have found sympathetic outlets in some of the diasporic press, where paranoia and anti-Semitism have been notably present.
Although Russell declines to debate such issues, he stated that "I will help with my pen what I still believe to be the great majority of Armenians to expose and destroy the sort of people who are not only dragging our field, but possibly the community itself into dangerous territory".
[16] Upon retiring from active teaching at Harvard, James Russell has lived in Fresno, California with his partner of many years, originally from Texas, the artist, photographer, scholar of Tibetan Buddhism and literature, the educator D.E.