Emily Jane O'Dell

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.