Michael Allan is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. He received his PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA in History and Modern Culture and Media (MCM) from Brown University. Before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon, Allan was a member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University (2008/09), where he was affiliated with the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. Allan also previously served as a Presidential Intern at the American University in Cairo and worked with its Institute for Gender and Women's Studies (2000/01).

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 practices of relating to texts and, in doing so, draws from methods in anthropology, film and visual culture, religion, and postcolonial studies. Focusing on transformations of literature in modern Egypt, the various chapters address the relation of literature to realism, moral education, empirical science to discourses of secularization.

During his EUME-fellowship, Allan plans to complete two new chapters: the first tracing the foundations of Dar al-Ulum (Teachers College) and Dar al-Kutub (The Egyptian National Library) in the 1870s, and the second dealing with Taha Husayn's novella "Adib" and the author's earlier correspondence with André Gide.