Brittany Landorf, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Vanderbilt University

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. I received my PhD in Religious Studies from Emory University. My research traces the ethics of madness, gender, and sexuality in North African Islamic mysticism, otherwise known as Sufism. I explore the ambiguity of madness, following the wandering figurations of the divinely mad Sufi saint, the majdhūb, as it travels from tenth-century Khorasan, to medieval Andalusia, and into early modern North Africa. I interweave textual analysis of mystical treatises, biographical dictionaries, and Qur'anic commentaries alongside studies of oral poetry and narratives of mad saints in North Africa today.

I ask: What makes the majdhub divinelymad, and not merely a madman? This question, I argue, is as much about negotiating authority, selfhood, and the society as it is about the mad saint. By examining the domestication of divine madness, I consider the ambiguities that drive as well as frustrate attempts to orderthe world. This study has implications for how we understand the relationship of marginal religious practice to so-called orthodoxies, suggesting that orthodoxy is a capacious category that is always developed in relation to ambiguity.

As a scholar of early Islam and its modern resonances, I am interested in the lives of Islamic texts, how they are lived out in place. In order to convey the lived intertextuality of Islamic textual traditions, I have turned to mapping. My current digital humanities project, Mapping the Female Saints of Fez, Rawḍ al-Awliyā’, presents the first full translation and maps the burial location of the female saints recorded in the hagiographic compendium Salwat al-Anfas composed by 19th-century Moroccan scholar Muḥammad ibn Ja’far al-Kattānī. You can visit the saints here.

When not writing or wandering in North Africa, I spend my time reading, gardening, and chasing after my two dogs with my partner in Minneapolis, Minnesota.