Dr. Emily Jane O’Dell received her BA, MA, MFA, and Ph.D. from Brown University and an additional MA in Central Asian Studies from Columbia University. In America, she has taught at Brown University, Columbia University, and Harvard University, where she received an award for teaching excellence, and she has also taught abroad in Lebanon, the Sultanate of Oman, and the People's Republic of China. She is the author of The Gift of Rumi, and her research can be found in the Journal of Global Slavery, the International Journal of Persian Literature, the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, the Journal of Africana Religions, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Disability & Society, Iranian Studies, and Harvard Law School's SHARIASource. She is presently a fellow at the American Institute for Indonesian Studies in Java, and she has previously been a Research Fellow at Yale Law School, an American Center for Mongolian Studies Fellow in Mongolia, a Fulbright-Hays Fellow in Indonesia, an Edward A. Hewett Policy Fellow in Tajikistan, and an American Councils Research Fellow in Turkmenistan. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, NPR, The Louisville Review, CounterPunch, Salon, TRT World, The Christian Science Monitor, and HuffPost, and she is currently writing a memoir about her time in Tibet.