Michael Allan

Michael AllanMichael Allan
Associate Professor 
Department of Comparative Literature

316 Villard
541-346-0981
mallan@uoregon.edu

Education

B.A. with Honors in Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and History at Brown University, 2000
PhD Comparative Literature (with a Designated Emphasis in Film) at UC Berkeley 2008

Research Statement

My research focuses on debates in postcolonial studies, world literature, and film and visual culture, primarily in Africa and the Middle East. I am currently at work on two books: the first, A Pre-History of World Cinema, traces the transnational history of camera operators working for the Lumière Brothers film company, and the second, The Aesthetics of Information, investigates a history of information systems in the Middle East (telegraph, typewriter, radio, and telephone) and their implications for the study of world literature.

Recent Citations – Publications – Professional Work

Book:

  • In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt, Princeton University Press (Spring 2016)

Articles Related to Film and Media:

  • “Dying to Read: Reflections on the Ends of Literacy”, New Literary History, Volume 51, Number 2, Spring 2020, 281-298.
  • “Picturing Other Languages: Reflections on Photography and Philology”, College English, Volume 82, Number 1, September 2019, 94-112.
  • “Old Media/New Futures: Revolutionary Reverberations of Fanon’s Radio”, PMLA, “New Geographies of Reading,” 134.1, Spring 2019, 188-193. 
  • “Youssef Chahine’s Iskandariyya…Leh?”, Entry for the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019), 847-851.
  • “Queer Couplings: Formations of Religion and Sexuality in The Yacoubian Building”, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, 44:4, 2013, 253-269.
  • “Deserted Histories: The Great Pyramid and Early Film Form”, Early Popular Visual Culture, 6:2, July 2008, 159-170