Tayseer Abu Odeh

tayseer abu odeh photo 2018 sli
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Al-Zaytoonah University of Jordan

Key Research Interests: 

  • Orientalism
  • Arabic Literature
  • Politics of Exile
  • Hermeneutics 
  • Secularism and Religion

 

I am currently a Section Editor for Postcolonial Text. As a Jordanian-Palestinian writer, translator, and scholar of Comparative and Postcolonial Studies, I grapple with the way in which the secular-religious dichotomy is juxtaposed with the various cultural, hermeneutic, and interpretive implications that make up the dynamic categorization of Islam. Building on the interpretive and Quranic method of Fakher al-Din al-Razi and Ibn Sina’a, I attempt to explore the discursive way in which reason can be reconciled with the scriptural within the Islamic medieval canon and the Islamic modern philosophy and theology. I received my PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2017, where I also taught Comparative Literature. I also taught at Middlebury Arabic School in California in 2015.

My research focus intersects with the multiple literary and epistemological paradigms of orientalism, exile, Arabic literature, and Ibn Khaldoun’s secular method alongside al- Ma’arri’s philosophy and the moral agency of his political aesthetics. In 2009, I was a visiting scholar at University of California-San Diego where I conducted a critical study on the politics of knowledge and late style in the work of Edward Said. My most recent publications are concerned with the intellectual resistance in the work of Yusuf al-Ani and the politics of exile and counterpoint in the work of Nuruddin Farah. My latest book, The Gardens of Exile, has recently been published from the Arab Institute for Research and Publication, Beirut.

 

I am also a permanent fellow of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research and Sylff Leadership Initiatives. I have been a recipient of Sylff Leadership Initiative (SLI) in 2018, the Outstanding Dissertation Award (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) in 2017, and the IUP Foundation Doctoral Fellowship in 2011.

 

Academic Profiles: 

 

 

Selected Publications: