Cassie Adcock

Associate Professor, Department of History; Associate Professor of Religion and Politics (by courtesy)

Cassie Adcock is Associate Professor in the Department of History and has a courtesy appointment in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. She a historian of modern South Asia with a focus on religion and politics in modern India. Her first book, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2013), addresses the politics of religious conversion in India by providing a critical history of Tolerance, a secularist ideal central to the Gandhian tradition. In her current book project, “Cattle Wealth and Cow Protection: Dharma, Development and the Secular State in India, 1881-1969,” she turns her attention from conversion to cow protection, which denotes the sentiments, practices and politics purportedly inspired by Hindu concern for the “sacred cow.” Adcock’s work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholar Award, an NEH-AIIS Senior Research Fellowship, and a Kluge Fellowship. Adcock earned her Ph.D. from University of Chicago.

Books