12-Month Faculty Research Fellow
J. Barton Scott (Ph.D. Religion, Duke University, 2009) works on the intellectual and cultural history of religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a focus on South Asia and its global 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 and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (both University of Chicago Press), the co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge), and the lead investigator on the SSHRC-funded website The Global Blasphemer.
Fellowship Research Project—The Piercing Virtue: Isherwood’s Guru in Adorno’s Los Angeles
When British novelist Christopher Isherwood fled his beloved Berlin in 1939, he moved to L.A., joining the leftist-expat intellectuals of “German California.” He also joined the Ramakrishna Mission, one of nineteenth-century India’s most successful religious exports, declaring himself a disciple of Bengali guru Swami Prabhavananda. To Isherwood’s German-Marxist friend, hierarchical guru culture felt suspiciously close to fascism. To his queer friends, his decision to renounce sex must have seem equally strange. I take the odd friendship between Isherwood and Prabhavananda as the starting point for a theoretically-inflected inquiry into global guru culture—into renunciation as piercing virtue—at mid-twentieth century.