The Emory River is a stream draining a portion of Tennessee's Cumberland Plateau.

It rises on the slopes of Frozen Head and Bird Mountain, prominent peaks in that part of the Cumberland Plateau in Morgan County, Tennessee. Frozen Head is the focus of a Tennessee state park and natural area. The surrounding area has been the subject of extensive strip mining for coal which has resulted in some stream pollution. The stream initially flows basically westward and is crossed by U.S. Highway 27. Turning more southwestward, it is paralled for a time by a line of the Norfolk Southern railroad. It meets the Obed River in the southeast corner of the expansive Catoosa Wildlife Managment Area, a large game-management area operated by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.

In an unsual violation of the generally-accepted convention that the larger stream name is retained downstream of the confluence with a notably smaller one, the stream from this point retains the name "Emory River" even though the Obed at the point of confluence is almost always larger, generally considerably larger. Still paralled by the railroad, the stream crosses into Roane County near the town of Harriman. Backwaters of the Watts Bar Lake impoundment of the Tennessee River cause the water below Harriman to be somewhat slack. The Little Emory River is also impounded somewhat above its mouth into the Emory below Harriman. The mouth of the Emory is into the Clinch River at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Steam Plant, a coal-fired electric generation station initially developed durin World War II, largely to power the uranium enrichment plant used to make the world's first atomic bomb at nearby Oak Ridge.