Michael Allan

is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. He earned his Ph.D. in 2008 from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked under the direction of Judith Butler and Karl Britto. During the academic year 2011/2012 he was fellow of the research program "Europe in the Middle East - the Middle East in Europe" (EUME). His research focuses on colonialism, secularization, and the formation of modern reading practices in Africa and the Middle East, primarily in French, Arabic, and English. In both his research and teaching, he bridges textual analysis with social theory and draws from methods in anthropology, film and visual culture, religion, and postcolonial studies.

His current book project, Inventing World Literature: How Adab Became Literary, offers a colonial history of literature at the intersection of the French, British and Ottoman empires, nineteenth-century moral education, and reforms in Qur'anic instruction in Egypt. The book examines how modern disciplines reshape textual practices, transform connotations of adab, and delineate the literate from the illiterate. The various chapters address the relation of literature to realism, moral education, empirical science, and debates on secularization.

More information on his publications is available at: complit.uoregon.edu/profile/mallan/