Introducing new faculty members

The following are among the new faculty members at the University.

Cassie Adcock, Ph.D., joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor with a joint appointment in religious studies. She received a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bard College in 1994, a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1996 and a master’s degree in the history of religions from the University of Chicago in 1997. Her doctorate was awarded this summer from the University of Chicago, where she completed a dissertation on modern religion and political culture in North India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her main research interests lie in the exploration of historically specific articulations of religion, secularism and tolerance in colonial and postcolonial India.

Asad Qadri Ahmed, Ph.D., joins the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences as assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic studies. His undergraduate training at Yale included western philosophy and literature; at Princeton, where he earned his doctorate, he expanded his fields of interest to include Islamic intellectual history in its first 400 years and early Islamic history. His further interests include Arabo-Islamic philosophy and theology with a special focus on logic and epistemology, classical Arabic poetry and poetics, Hadith studies, Tafsir and Graeco-Arabica.

Jean Allman, Ph.D., joins the Department of History in Arts & Sciences as the Jack Hexter Professor in the Humanities. Since receiving her doctorate from Northwestern University in 1987, she has held faculty positions at the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of Minnesota, where she was tenured in 1996, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which she joined in 2001 as professor of history — with appointments in African studies and gender and women’s studies — and where she served as director of the university’s Center for African Studies from 2003-07. She is a specialist in the social, cultural and political history of West Africa and is the author or editor of six books, including, most recently, “TONGNAAB: The History of a West African God” (2005).

Xiumin Martin, Ph.D., joins the Olin Business School as assistant professor of accounting. She focuses her research on the role of voluntary accounting disclosures, the properties of accounting numbers and the role of information on assets pricing. Martin has a doctorate in financial accounting from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a master of philosophy in accounting from the Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong.