Michael is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 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. He 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.