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Last edited June 19, 2025

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Jaishree Odin is a literary scholar who is the director and a professor of the Program of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi.[1] Her research relates to cultural studies of science and technology, literary and political ecology, ecology and ethics, system's ecology, and eco-literacy.[2] Her work ranges from German philosophy[3] and the feminist angle to mysticism.Template:Citation needed She has also considered the current relevance of Shaivite theories of higher consciousness.Template:Citation needed

Jaishree is sister of computer scientists Avinash Kak and Subhash Kak.

Education and career

Odin obtained a Master of Science degree in chemistry from India, following which she went on to earn a doctorate in comparative literature from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.Template:Citation needed

Odin teaches in the Liberal Studies program at the University of Hawaii. Besides, she is 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.[4]

Works

Translations

She is one of the translators of Lalleshvari, the famed 14th century Kashmiri mystic and poet.[5][6] She has also translated Kashmir's early Sufi poetry, especially that of Nunda Reshi.[7] Odin's essays have been published in Commonwealth Studies and in the collection Postcolonialism and American Ethnicity.[8]

Electronic literature

Odin wrote To the Other Shore: Lalla's Life and Poetry (Vitasta Pub, 1999).

Odin's work includes Through the Looking Glass: Technology, Nomadology and Postmodern Narrative which the Electronic Literature State of the Arts Symposium describes as a critical exploration of shattered visual metaphors in contemporary literature which includes electronic literary forms.[9]

Odin has written extensively on technology-mediated narrative forms as well as the role of technology in re-visioning higher education.[10] Some of her published articles on electronic literature have dealt with the potential of the electronic media in depicting contemporary experience in multiple ways.[11] 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."

Odin's work includes critical exploration of shattered visual metaphors in contemporary literature[12]

Awards

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

Bibliography

References

  1. UHawaii site. Retrieved February 16, 2015.
  2. Jaishree Odin | Interdisciplinary Studies. manoa.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 18 December 2015.
  3. Overlapping aesthetic perspectives as international, revolutionary space in presentations from the German revolution to the Spanish Civil War{{#if:|, {{{last}}}}(2006). ISBN 978-0-549-99193-9
  4. ELO State of the Arts Symposium: Jaishree Odin. eliterature.org. Retrieved 18 December 2015.
  5. To the other shore: Lalla's life and poetry. Hillsboro Beach: Vitasta (1999)
  6. J. Odin Kak, Mystical Verses of Lalla. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass (2009)
  7. J. Odin, Lalla to Nuruddin: Rishi-Sufi Poetry of Kashmir. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass (2013)
  8. Jaishree K. Odin – The Edge of Difference: Negotiations Between the Hypertextual and the Postcolonial – Modern Fiction Studies 43:3. yorku.ca. Retrieved 18 December 2015.
  9. Biography. Electronic Literature Organization(March 1, 2023). Retrieved March 1, 2023.
  10. Manicas and Odin, Globalization and Higher Education. Mānoa: University of Hawaiʻi (2004)
  11. Ponzanesi, S. and Koen, L. On digital crossings in Europe. Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, Volume 5, Number 1, March 1, 2014, pages 3–22
  12. J. Odin, Hypertext and the Female Imaginary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010)

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