DR. EMILY JANE O'DELL has spent over two decades visiting Sufi masters and communities from Indonesia to Mali, studied Sufi whirling in Cairo and Istanbul, and preserved Sufi shrines as an archaeologist on the Silk Road in Turkmenistan. A global scholar and adventurer, she has been the Whittlesey Chair of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut, an Associate Professor at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute in China, an Assistant Professor at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman, an 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 a teaching excellence award. Her research can be found in the Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of Iranian Studies, Journal of Africana Religions, Obsidian: Literature&Arts in the African Diaspora, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability&Society, and 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.
Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell is an Associate Professor at Sichuan University-Pittsburgh Institute in China. She has served as the Whittlesey Chair of History and Archaeology at the American University of Beirut, an 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 a teaching excellence award. Her research can be found in the Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of Iranian Studies, Journal of Africana Religions, Obsidian: Literature&Arts in the African Diaspora, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability&Society, and 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.