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Department of
Religious Studies

Adeana McNicholl

Assistant Professor
Religious Studies, Buddhist Traditions of South and South East Asia
Mellon Foundation Dean's Faculty Fellow in Religious Studies

Adeana McNicholl is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Her first book, Of Ancestors and Ghosts (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the historical development of the Buddhist preta, or ghost, through narrative literature, asserting the importance of ghost stories for the creation of cosmological ideas. Of Ancestors and Ghosts adds to this historical analysis a literary one, showing how the reincarnated “hungry” ghost helped constitute hierarchies of human bodily difference in relation to class, caste, gender, and sexuality and demonstrating the importance of literary aesthetics for both giving weight to hierarchies of bodily difference and destabilizing these hierarchies.

Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity, illustrates the importance of Buddhism for the conceptualization of Blackness within transnational anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste movements. This work traces a longer history in which Black people looked to Buddhism to resignify Blackness, repudiate the racial logics of Orientalism, and construct an alternate modernity that, while intersecting with other forms of Buddhist modernism, offers a politically distinct discourse that cannot be articulated separately from American racial politics.

Her other projects include a documentary reader on Black Buddhism, which she is co-editing with Ralph H. Craig III. She is also co-directing with Nicholas Witkowski the Buddhism and Caste Initiative, which seeks to bring together scholars of premodern and modern Buddhism to address how caste has structured Buddhism and Buddhist Studies and how Buddhism provides tools for anti-caste, anti-racist, and postcolonial movements. With Ann Gleig, she has compiled resources for “Teaching Race and Racism in Buddhist Studies,” hosted on Teaching Buddhist Studies and funded by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre at the University of Toronto. The project can be found here: http://teachingbuddhism.net/teaching-race-and-racism/


Representative Publications

  • McNicholl, Adeana. “Buddhism and Race in the United States.” Religion Compass. 2021. 1–13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/rec3.12412
  • McNicholl, Adeana. “The Generative Power of Disgust: Aesthetics and the Abject Preta Body.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 43 (2020). 129–165.
  • McNicholl, Adeana. “Being Buddha, Staying Woke: Racial Formation in Black Buddhist Writings.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 86 (4). 2018. 883–911. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfy019
  • McNicholl Adeana. Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/of-ancestors-and-ghosts-9780197748909
  • McNicholl, Adeana. “The ‘Black Buddhism Plan’: Buddhism, Race, and Empire in the Twentieth Century.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 31 (3). 2021. 1–47. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.16.