Description:

Please join the Global Religion and Politics Research Group, the South Asia Research forum and the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures as they host Neeti Nair (Professor, University of Virginia) and J. Barton Scott (Associate Professor, University of Toronto) where they will talk about their newly released books.

Neeti Nair is a professor of history at the University of Virginia.  Nair teaches survey courses on 18th-20th century South Asia as well as upper-level seminar coures and graduate courses on the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and blasphemy politics in South Asia. She is the author of two books, Hurt Sentiments:  Secularism and Belonging in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2023) and Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2011, pbk 2016). She has also edited two special issues of Asian Affairs: 'Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia' was published in 2018 and 'Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India' was published in 2022.

Nair's research has been supported by fellowships from the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Taraknath Das Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a non-residential Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.

J. Barton Scott (Ph.D. Religion, Duke University, 2010) 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 (University of Chicago, 2016) and Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (Chicago/Permanent Black, 2023), and the co-editor of Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia (Routledge, 2016). He 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. During academic year 2023-24, Scott is a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Fellow at the University of Toronto's Jackman Humanities Institute, under the theme "Absence."