J. Barton Scott

J. Barton Scott works on the global intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on South Asia and its transnational connections. He teaches courses on social and cultural theory, media and material religion, and religion in political thought. He is the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (University of Chicago Press/Primus, 2016) and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (University of Chicago Press/Permanent Black, 2023) and the coeditor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge, 2019). Scott holds a PhD from Duke University.  

Featured Work: Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule; Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India.

Upcoming Projects: Dr. Scott is currently working on a book called The Piercing Virtue: Isherwood’s Guru in Adorno’s Los Angeles, which takes the unlikely friendship between a British novelist and a Bengali monk as the starting point for a theoretically-inflected inquiry into global guru culture—into renunciation as piercing virtue—at mid-twentieth century.