Brittany Landorf

Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow

Brittany Landorf is an ethnographic historian of Islam in North Africa, focusing on madness, mysticism, and orthodoxy. Her research aims to write a genealogy of divine madness in premodern and modern North Africa that offers a new history of religion and psychology. Her current book project, Maddening Saints: Debating Orthodoxy and Defining Mental Illness in North African Islam, asks: “How did a sixteenth-century mad saint (majdhūb) come to signify correct religious practice and doctrine in North Africa today?” She demonstrates how the creative synthesis of Islamic medical understandings of the self with defenses of mystical experiences produced the mad saint as a liminal figure, irreducible to orthodox religious discourse and unknowable to medical science. The ubiquity of the mad saint in North Africa today, in markets and mosques, at the edges of mental hospitals, reveals the limits of religious doctrines that aim to circumscribe ecstatic experiences and medical epistemologies that attempt to pathologize mental illness.

Fellowships

• 2024: Emory Women’s Club Dissertation Completion Fellowship 
• 2022-2023: Fulbright Student Research Fellowship, Morocco 

Teaching

Vanderbilt University

• Introduction to Islam 

Macalester College

• Religion and Masculinity 
• The Qur’an and the Prophet
• Comparative Muslim Cultures 
• Islam and America