James C. Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, with appointments in the Department of Anthropology and School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He is the author of over nine books, most of which are not only widely read across the disciplines of the social sciences, but considered foundational works in those disciplines. In this oral history, Jim Scott discusses his childhood in New Jersey and the Quaker school that played a large role in shaping the scholar known for marching to his own drum. He discusses his experience with the National Student Association during the early 1960s, the interesting turn his studies took upon entry to Yale Graduate School, and the string of books he produced in the decades that followed. These include The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia; Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance; Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts; Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia; and Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, among other works. He also recounts the founding of the Program in Agrarian Studies, an interdisciplinary flagship in the humanities and social sciences now celebrating thirty years of operation at Yale University.