Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Follow Emily Jane O'Dell to get new release emails from Audible and Amazon.
Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell is the author of The Gift of Rumi and a renowned
expert on Sufism and Islamic law. She has spent over two decades
visiting Sufi masters from Indonesia to Mali, studied Sufi whirling in
Cairo and Istanbul, and preserved historic Sufi shrines on the Silk
Road. For her expertise in Islamic law, she has been a Research
Scholar in Law and Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at
Yale Law School, and an editor for Harvard Law School’s SHARIASource.
Stateside she has taught at Columbia, Brown, and Harvard, where she
received an award for teaching excellence, and she has also taught
abroad as the Whittlesey Chair of History and Archaeology at the
American University of Beirut, an Associate Professor at Sichuan
University–Pittsburgh Institute in China, and an Assistant Professor
at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. She has taught
Sufi whirling in Istanbul, Beirut, and New York.
For her in-country field research on Sufism, she has been an Edward A.
Hewett Policy Fellow (Tajikistan & Afghanistan), a Fulbright Fellow (Indonesia),
a Harvard Traveling Fellow (Iran), a Columbia University Pepsico Fellow
(Uzbekistan/Karakalpakstan), an American Center for Mongolian Studies Fellow (Mongolia),
an American Councils Fellow (Turkmenistan), a State Department Critical Language Fellow
(Tajikistan), and an IREX Fellow (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Czech Republic,
Slovak Republic & Hungary). Her research on Sufism and Islamic history can be found
in the International Journal of Persian Literature, Iranian Studies,
Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of Africana Religions, Obsidian:
Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies, Disability & Society, and Harvard Law
School's SHARIASource. Her writing has appeared in The New York
Times, The Louisville Review, Al Jazeera, NPR, CounterPunch, Salon,
TRT World, The Christian Science Monitor, and Huffington Post.
Currently a professor at Parami University in Myanmar and a fellow at
the American Institute for Indonesian Studies in Java, she is
presently writing a memoir about her adventures in China and Tibet.
Read more
Read less
