Dean Accardi
Dean Accardi is an historian of gender and religion in South Asia and the Islamic World. His research reexamines notions of mutually exclusive religions, hybridity, and syncretism; reconceptualizes relationships between religions and other social phenomena; and highlights how historical and religious narratives reconstruct the past to serve socio-political agendas.
His current book project, An Ascetic Body Politic, examines depictions of asceticism in histories and hagiographies of sixteenth-century Kashmir and analyzes how bodily practices of saints like Lal Ded and Nund Rishi were used to shape ideas of gender, sainthood, and sovereignty.