Michael Allan is associate professor of comparative literature and Petrone Faculty Scholar at the University of Oregon, as well as a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2017-2018). He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Winner MLA Prize for a First Book), and is currently researching the travels of the Lumière Brothers film company across North Africa and the Middle East.