David Scott

Friendship, Moral Theory, Biography

Caribbean; Sri Lanka

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.

Between January 2013 and June 2013, he was Visiting Professor at the Université de Paris 1—Panthéon-Sorbonne; between January 2019 and January 2021, he was Extraordinary Professor at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town: and in the summers of 2022 and 2023 he was the Mercator Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Potsdam. He has lectured widely, at venues around the world, most recently in Accra, Addis Ababa, Amsterdam, Berlin, Cape Town, Dar es Salaam, Hong Kong, Kingston, Johannesburg, Kolkata, London, Manchester, New Delhi, Oslo, and Paris. David is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe (smallaxe.net), the premier journal of the Caribbean and the African diaspora (published three times per year by Duke University Press), now in its twenty-ninth year, and director of the Small Axe Project. In this context, over the past decade, he has directed a number of visual arts exhibition projects: Caribbean Queer Visualities (Outburst Queer Arts Festival, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast [11 November 2016—7 January 2017]; and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow [18 February 2017—25 March 2017]); The Visual Life of Social Affliction (National Art Gallery, Nassau, The Bahamas [22 August 2019—10 November 2019]; Little Haiti Cultural Center Art Gallery [6 December 2019—28 February 2020]; and TENT, Rotterdam [10 July 2020—27 September 2020]), and Pressure, the Kingston Biennial 2022 (26 June—31 December 2022). The Small Axe Project has most recently engaged in a series of interventions around the theme of Caribbean Modernism (see: smallaxe.net/sxprojects).

New School for Social Research, PhD in Anthropology, 1989
University of the West Indies at Mona, BSc in Government, 1980