David A. Scott

Biography

David Scott teaches at Columbia University, New York, where he is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is the author of seven books, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minnesota, 1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, 1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke, 2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Duke, 2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke, 2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (Columbia, 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (Polity, 2023), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford, 2007). He is currently at work on two book projects—the first is a biography of Stuart Hall; and the second is a reconsideration of the question of reparation and revolution through the work of Walter Rodney.