Michael Allan is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon, where he is affiliated with Cinema Studies and Arabic. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, and the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. 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. Both his research and teaching bridge textual analysis with social theory and draw from film and visual culture, religion, anthropology, and postcolonial studies. He is the editor of a special issue of Comparative Literature, and has articles published in Early Popular Visual Culture, Parachute, Comparative Literature Studies, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Arabic Literature, and Equinoxes.