Jaishree Odin

Jaishree Odin is a literary scholar who is the director and a professor of the Program of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii. The thrust of her research work involves cultural studies of science and technology, literary and political ecology, ecology and ethics, system’s ecology, and eco-literacy. Her work ranges from German philosophyand the feminist angle to mysticism. She has also considered the current relevance of Shaivite theories of higher consciousness.

Odin obtained her M.Sc. in Chemistry from India, following which she went on to get a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Odin teaches in the Liberal Studies program at the University of Hawaii. Apart from this, she is also the director of a Sloan foundation funded online distance-learning project at the university, which is intended to increase access to higher education in the state of Hawaii.

She is one of the translators of Lalleshvari, the famed 14th century Kashmiri mystic and poet. She has also translated Kashmir's early Sufi poetry, especially that of Nunda Reshi. Odin's essays have been published in Commonwealth Studies and in the collection Postcolonialism and American Ethnicity.

Odin has written extensively on technology mediated narrative forms as well as the role of technology in re-visioning higher education. Some of her published articles on electronic literature have dealt with the potential of the electronic media in depicting contemporary experience in multiple ways. Ponzanesi and Koen claim: "As Jaishree Odin has so aptly written, both the hypertext and the postcolonial are discourses are characterized by multivocality, multilinearity, open-endedness, active encounter and traversal. Both disrupt chronological sequences and spatial ordering (1997), allowing for a contestation of master narratives and the creation of subaltern positioning."

Her work includes critical exploration of shattered visual metaphors in contemporary literature

For her work, she has been awarded various awards and grants, including a Fulbright Research Fellowship, the Alfred Sloan Foundation award and UH Relations Research Award.