Biography

J. Barton Scott works on questions of secularism, empire, and the history of the study of religion in colonial South Asia and Victorian Britain. 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, 2016) and the co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia(Routledge, 2016). He is currently finishing a book titled Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (University of Chicago, forthcoming) and running a collaborative SSHRC-funded research project called “The Global Blasphemer.”