Email: rs995@cam.ac.uk
Dr Robert Lucas Scott
Robert Lucas Scott is a Research Fellow working on topics in literature, philosophy, and critical theory. His current project is on the philosopher Gillian Rose.
Academic interests
Rob’s new project is on the late British philosopher and critical theorist Gillian Rose. Entitled The Search for Style, it aims to reconstruct Rose’s intellectual development with attention to her engagements with literary critical questions and her own experiments with literary form. Among other topics, it will explore the ethics of representation, the drama of misrecognition, and the agon of authorship. Rob is also a coeditor of a volume of Rose’s lectures on the Frankfurt School, entitled Marxist Modernism.
His first monograph, Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique, is forthcoming in March 2025. Through a reading of Hegel, it explores the importance of experience for a theory and practice of critical reading.
His other research interests include continental philosophy, literary theory, English Romanticism, lyric poetry, the essay as form, the Bible and Biblical hermeneutics, and Marx and Marxism. He is also interested in philosophical conceptions of the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Degrees obtained
- BA, University of Exeter.
- MA, University of Sussex.
- PhD, Cantab.
Biography
Robert Lucas Scott is a Research Fellow at Jesus College. He has a BA in English from the University of Exeter, and a MA in Literature and Philosophy from the University of Sussex. He completed his PhD in English at Cambridge in 2022.
He teaches papers on Lyric; The Ethical Imagination; English Literature and its Contexts (1870 to the Present); History and Theory of Literary Criticism; and Practical Criticism and Critical Practice.
Department link
https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/Publications, links and resources
Books
- Reading Hegel: Irony, Recollection, Critique. University of Chicago Press, March 2025.
- Rose, Gillian. Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Edited with Gordon Finlayson, with an afterword by Martin Jay. Verso Books, August 2024.
Articles
- ‘The Anxiety of Beginning.’ Thesis Eleven. Special issue on the work of Gillian Rose, edited by Michael Lazarus and Daniel Lopez (forthcoming).
- ‘“The Letter Kills, but the Spirit Gives Life”: Letters on the Spirit and the Letter of Hegel’s Philosophy.’ Critical Horizons, August 2023, pp. 266–281.
- ‘The Limits of Recognition.’ Angelaki, 27(6), November 2022, pp. 21–30.
- ‘Suffering and the Feeling of Suffering in Marx’s Capital.’ Textual Practice, 36(1), June 2020, pp. 76–93.
Reviews
- ‘Postcritique, or, The Cultural Logic of Capitalist Realism’, review of Robert T. Tally Jr., For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists: Literature in an Age of Capitalist Realism. Los Angeles Review of Books, 14 September 2022.
- Review of Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Shelley’s Broken World: Fractured Materiality and Intermitted Song. Review of English Studies, January 2022.
- Annual reviews of all scholarship on eighteenth-century poetry for the Years Work in English Studies (2019, 2020, 2021).
