Mercator Fellows

David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (forthcoming 2023). He has just completed a book titled “Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History,” and is now working on a biography of Stuart Hall. Scott was also the curatorial director of the exhibitions Caribbean Queer Visualities (Belfast, Glasgow, 2016, 2017), and The Visual Life of Social Affliction (Nassau, Miami, Rotterdam, 2019, 2020), and is the lead curator of Pressure: The Kingston Biennial 2022 (Kingston 2022). He is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project, in the context of which he curates a programme on Caribbean modernism.

Keith L. Camacho is a Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research examines the ways in which Japan and the United States have colonized the Mariana Islands and related locales in Oceania, as well as disavowed the political agencies of Chamorros and other Pacific Islanders. His award-winning monographs and co-edited collections evidence this intellectual trajectory about and political intervention against empire. The notable works include Reppin’: Pacific Islander Youth and Native Justice (University of Washington Press, 2021); Sacred Men: Law, Torture, and Retribution in Guam (Duke University Press, 2019); Senka wo Kinensuru: Guamu Saipan no Rekishi to Kioku, Translated by Akira Nishimura and Yasuki Machi (Iwanami Shoten, 2016); Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History in the Mariana Islands (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011); and Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). His research has also been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership. Presently, Professor Camacho is studying Pacific Islander and Samoan forms of community service, public protest, and youth rebellion in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States.