Global Adventurer & Nomad. Award Winning Professor & Writer. Playwright, Screenwriter, & Performer. Law & Foreign Policy Expert. Egyptologist / Anthropologist / Archaeologist. Concert Javanese Gamelan Musician. Whirling Dervish and Tai Chi Teacher.

Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell is the author of The Gift of Rumi: Experiencing the Wisdom of the Sufi Master (St. Martin’s Press). As a renowned expert on Sufism and Islamic law, she has spent over two decades visiting Sufi masters from Indonesia to Mali, taught Sufi whirling in Istanbul and Beirut, and preserved historic Sufi shrines on the Silk Road. She is currently writing a memoir about teaching in China during the COVID-19 pandemic (while studying tai chi with kung fu masters) and adventuring in Tibet.

Dr. O’Dell is a global mentor for the Coalition for Women in Journalism, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, NPR, Al Jazeera,Christian Science Monitor, TRT World, Counterpunch, The Louisville Review, and The Huffington Post.

As a professor, 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, an Assistant Professor at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman, and a Professor at Parami University in Myanmar. 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.

Dr. O’Dell completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University in the Humanities Center and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations under the direction of Professor Homi Bhabha. She received her PhD, MA, MFA, and MA from Brown University and an additional Masters in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies from Columbia University.

Her research can be read in the Journal of Global Slavery, Journal of Iranian Studies, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Africana Religions, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, International Journal of Persian Literature, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Disability & Society, and Harvard Law School’s SHARIASource.

For her expertise on religion and politics, she has been an Edward A. Hewett Policy Fellow, a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, a Harvard Traveling Fellow, a Harvard Research Fellow, an American Councils Research Fellow, an IREX Fellow, an American Center for Mongolian Studies Fellow, an American Institute of Indonesian Studies Fellow, and a State Department Critical Languages Fellow for Persian and Tajiki.

Thanks to the generous support of a number of research grants, Dr. O’Dell has conducted extensive in-country research in the following countries: Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Indonesia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tibet, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan/Karakalpakstan, Egypt, Russia, Syria, Mali, Lebanon, Turkey, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, and Hungary.

For seven years, she served as the Chief Epigrapher for Brown and Cairo University at the Great Pyramids in Egypt, where she excavated mummies, and collaborated on recently returned objects with the Egyptian Museum.

She has also conducted archaeological field-work in Central Asia and Sudan.  She has preserved Sufi shrines and excavated Islamic archaeology on the Silk Road in Turkmenistan, and excavated a Meroitic temple in Sudan.

For her research, Dr. O’Dell uses Arabic, Persian/Tajik, Indonesian, Russian, Czech, Mongolian, French, German, Italian, Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Coptic, Demotic, Akkadian, Chinese, Tibetan, French, German, Maltese, Italian, Burmese, American Sign Language (ASL) and Ge’ez.

With an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she received the Weston Award for Creative Writing, she has also taught creative writing and performance studies at Harvard and Brown and abroad in China and Myanmar.

Readings and productions of her plays have been produced at theatres such as Lincoln Center, the Public Theatre, City Center, Trinity Repertory Company, Perishable Theatre, Brown University, and the New York Fringe Festival. In addition to doing professional standup comedy in Hollywood (with the greats!), she also works in film and television. She is currently working on staging her new play and producing her latest screenplays.

Dr. O’Dell regularly performs Javanese gamelan music in concert in America at venues such as Lincoln Center, the Indonesian Consulate, Asia Society, and The Stone, and in Indonesia with master Javanese musicians. She also teaches Sufi whirling in Beirut, Istanbul, and New York —  and recently launched her standup comedy world tour in the People’s Republic of China. You can keep up with all of her latest adventures on her blog on this website.