J. Barton Scott

J. Barton Scott (Ph.D. Religion, Duke University, 2010) 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, religion in political thought, and media and material religion. He is the author of Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (University of Chicago/Primus 2016; Honorable Mention for the 2018 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association) and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (University of Chicago/Permanent Black, 2023), and the co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge, 2016). His recent publications include the 2024 article “Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy,” published by Comparative Studies in Society and History, which excavates the world of mid-nineteenth century transcolonial heterodoxy to reveal a literally corporeal formation of secularism intertwined with historical structures of race, caste, class, gender, and sexuality.  

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.