Brittany Landorf, PhD

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Carleton College

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College. I received my PhD in Religious Studies from Emory University in 2025.

Trained in textual-historical and ethnographic methods, my interdisciplinary research focuses on the formation of Islamic Mysticism, or Sufism, in North Africa. I am especially interested in the relationship of madness and mysticism, embodiment and sanctity, and narrative and ecology. I primarily work with premodern Arabic textual traditions, including biographical narratives, mystical treatises, Arabic poetry, and medical manuals. My ethnographic research analyzes oral narratives to map how historical categories, such as a mad saint, are reworked in the present.

I teach classes on Islam, madness and the self, gender and sexuality, and religion and ecology.

As a scholar of premodern Islam and its modern resonances, I am interested in the lives of Islamic texts, how they are lived out in place.

My digital humanities project, Mapping the Female Saints of Fez, Rawḍ al-Awliyā’, recreates the ritual experience of visiting the female saints of Fez. It visualizes the biographical map of their shrines as recorded by the Moroccan scholar and biographer Muḥammad ibn Jaʿfar al-Kattānī (d. 1927) in his hagiographic compendium, Salwat al-Anfās. The map also presents the first complete Arabic-English translation of these saintly figures' biographies. 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.