David Scott is Emeritus Professor of French (Textual & Visual Studies) at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
As a semiologist, Professor Scott’s work over the last three decades has centred on aesthetics, poetics and the relationship between text and image across a wide range of cultural practices and has led to landmark books on poetry and the visual arts(1988;2009) surrealist painting (1992), the postage stamp (1995, 2002), travel writing (2004), the poster (2010), and boxing (2009, 2015). His translation of Mallarmé’s sonnets (2008) has also been widely acclaimed.
A specialist in the visual arts as well as literature, Professor Scott was curator of the TCD modern art collection (1976-1992), member of the board of the Douglas Hyde Gallery (1979-1991) and curator of important exhibitions such as Treasures of the Mind, which marked the 400th anniversary of Trinity College Dublin (1992), and European Stamp Design (Design Museum, London 1995-96).
A regular contributor to postgraduate courses in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Zürich Scott was visiting lecturer in semiotics at the Catholic University Sao Paulo (1996-1999), and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Brisbane (2011-2014). He has also been an invited speaker at the Collège de France, the Sorbonne, Université Paris 7, and the Technical University, Sydney.
A national-level athlete (from sub-15 at 5000m to a 2:32:58 marathon) Professor Scott is also a light middleweight boxer, who has fought in both Ireland and America. Boxing has been an important strand of his research over the last decade, focusing on issues of masculinity, identity and aesthetics (2009, 2010, 2015, 2016). In 2011, he organised in TCD an international symposium, ‘Cultures of Boxing’ and in 2013 wrote the preface to Max Khandhola’s photographic exhibition ’The Aura of Boxing’. His forthcoming volume of short stories, ‘Cut up on Copacabana’ (2018) includes twelve texts on boxing rings.
Boxing is the centre of ProfessorScott’s work at Durham in 2018 within Professor Kay Schiller’s Masculinities in Martial Sports programme. His project, the Boxing Gym as Masculine Space, includes an exhibition and/or photographic project on boxing gyms – again in collaboration with Max Kandhola, a seminar on masculine spaces, and a lecture on boxing aesthetics.