J. Barton Scott

Biography:

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, 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) and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (University of Chicago/Permanent Black), and the co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge). His recent publications include the article “Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy,” published by Comparative Studies of 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.

Education:

Ph.D. Duke University 
B.A. Swarthmore College

Publications
Books:

• Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023; Delhi: Permanent Black, 2023).
• Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016; Delhi: Primus Books, 2017).
  • Honorable Mention for the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Prize for an Outstanding First Book.
• Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia. Co-edited with Brannon Ingram and SherAli Tareen (London: Routledge, 2016, from a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies).

Articles and Book Chapters:

• "Heterodoxies of the Body: Death, Secularism, and the Corpse of Raja Rammohun Roy,” Comparative Studies of Society and History. “FirstView” publication, April 2024. Journal issue publication forthcoming.
• "Insulting Religion: Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 91, no. 1 (2023): 35-50.
• “Translated Liberties: Karsandas Mulji’s Travels in England and the Anthropology of the Victorian Self,” Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 3 (2019): 803-833.
• "A Commonwealth of Affection: Modern Hinduism and the Cultural History of the Study of Religion," Constructing Nineteenth Century Religion, eds. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).
• "Only Connect: Three Reflections on the Sociality of Secularism," Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, no. 1 (2019): 48-69.
• “How to Defame a God: Public Selfhood in the Maharaj Libel Case,” in Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia, eds. Brannon Ingram, J. Barton Scott, and SherAli Tareen, special issue of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies 38 no. 3 (2015): 387-402.
• "What is a Public? Notes from South Asia" (co-authored with Brannon Ingram), in Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia, eds. Brannon Ingram, J. Barton Scott, and SherAli Tareen, special issue of South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies 38 no. 3 (2015): 357-370.
• "Aryas Unbound: Print Hinduism and the Cultural Regulation of Religious Offense,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 35, no. 2 (2015): 294-309.
• “Luther in the Tropics: Karsandas Mulji and the Colonial ‘Reformation’ of Hinduism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 1 (2015): 181-209.
• “Unsaintly Virtue: Swami Dayananda Saraswati and Modern Hindu Hagiography,” Journal of Hindu Studies 7, no. 3 (2014): 371-391.
• “Comic Book Karma: Visual Mythologies of the Hindu Modern,” in Inscriptions, eds. Jeremy Stolow and Lisa Gitelman, special issue of Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds 4, no. 2 (2010): 177-197.
• “Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity, and the Coulomb Affair,” History of Religions 49, no. 2 (2009): 172-196.

Select Culture Criticism and Public Writing:

• "The Surprising History of Global Blasphemy Law," The Immanent Frame, April 2024.
• Review of Lost Ladies (dir. Kiran Rao, 2023), Journal of Religion & Film 27, no. 2, October 2023.
• Review of Kill (dir. Nikhil Nagesh Bhat, 2023), Journal of Religion & Film 27, no. 2, October 2023.
• Review of The Convert (dir. Lee Tamahori), Journal of Religion & Film 27, no. 2, October 2023.
• Podcast Interview with Raj Balkaran, New Books Network, June 2023.
• "Religion in Lovecraft Country," The Revealer, February 2021.
• "Mucho Mucho Amor, Mucho Mucho Religion," The Revealer, October 2020.
• Review of Anand Patwardhan's Reason (Vivek), Journal of Religion & Film 22, no. 2, October 2018.

Specialization:

• Modern South Asia
• Postcolonial Theory
• Secularism
• Religion and Law
• Media and Popular Culture
• Affect Theory
• History of Study of Religion