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.^{[citation needed]} She has also considered the current relevance of Shaivite theories of higher consciousness.^{[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.^{[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.