Cassie Adcock


Associate Professor of History and South Asian Studies
PhD, University of Chicago
BA, Bard College
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Cassie Adcock is a historian of modern South Asia with a focus on religion and politics in modern India.

Selected Publications

Books

The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Articles

"Cow Protection and Minority Rights in India: Reassessing Religious Freedom," Special Issue: "Ghosts from the Past? Assessing Recent Developments in Religious Freedom in South Asia," Asian Affairs 19, 49, no. 2 (June 2018): 340-354.

"Violence, Passion, and the Law: A Brief History of Section 295A and its Antecedents." Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2016).

“Debating Conversion, Silencing Caste: The Limited Scope of Religious Freedom." Special Issue, "Politics of Religious Freedom," Journal of Law and Religion 29, no. 3 (October 2014): 363-377.

"The problem of translation: A view from India." The Immanent Frame (blog) (2012).

“Brave Converts in the Arya Samaj: the Case of Dharm Pal”, in Anshu Malhotra and Farina Mir, eds., Punjab Reconsidered: History, Culture and Practice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 261-286.

“Sacred Cows and Secular History: Cow Protection Debates in Colonial North India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 30, no. 2 (2010): 297-311.

Book Reviews

Review of Hackett, Rosalind I. J. ed., Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets and Culture Wars. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2008. Religion 40 (2010): 70-72.

Mitra Sharafi. Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947. The American Historical Review 2015 120 (5): 1875-1876. 
 

Awards

Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress (Spring 2016)

NEH-American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship (Fall 2015)

Summer Faculty Research Grant, Washington University in St. Louis (Summer 2015)

Arts & Sciences 2014 Summer Research Seed Grant, Washington University in Saint Louis (Summer 2014)

Fulbright Scholar Award, Fulbright-Nehru Grant, United States-India Educational Foundation (2010-2011)

Harper Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago (2003-2004)

Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Assistance Fellowship (2002)

 

Recent Courses

Modern South Asia

Environment and Empire

Secular and Religious: A Global History

Religion and Politics in South Asia: Writing Intensive Seminar

Gurus, Saints and Scientists: Religion in Modern South Asia

Advanced Seminar: Religion and the Secular: Struggles over Modernity

in the news:

The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom

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The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom

By Cassie Adcock

This book provides a critical history of the distinctive tradition of Indian secularism known as Tolerance. Since it was first advanced by Mohandas Gandhi, the Tolerance ideal has measured secularism and civil religiosity by contrast with proselytizing religion. In India today, it informs debates over how the right to religious freedom should be interpreted on the subcontinent. Not only has Tolerance been an important political ideal in India since the early twentieth century; the framing assumptions of Tolerance permeate historical understandings among scholars of South Asian religion and politics.