Author Information:

Dr. Emily Jane O'Dell is a Research Scholar in Law and Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow in the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School, and an editor of SHARIAsource at Harvard Law School, after having spent over half a decade teaching in the Middle East at the American University of Beirut as the Whittlesey Chair of History and Archaeology and at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman. She has also taught at Columbia University, Brown University, and Harvard University, where she received an award for teaching excellence. She received her BA, MFA, MA and PhD from Brown and a Masters in Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian Studies from Columbia. She completed her Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard in the Humanities Center and Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations under postcolonial theorist Professor Homi Bhabha. She was the Chief Epigrapher at the Great Pyramids of Giza for a Cairo University and Brown University excavation, and more recently excavated a Meroitic temple in Sudan, unearthed Islamic archaeology in Turkmenistan, and preserved Sufi shrines on the Silk Road. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Salon, Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera, and Huffington Post, and she is a global mentor for the Coalition for Women in Journalism. Emily regularly performs the Javanese gamelan in concert at Lincoln Center, Asia Society, and in Java. She is also a produced playwright and has worked in television and film.