Roger Allen was born in England in 1942 and educated at Oxford University where he obtained the D. Phil. degree in 1968 with a dissertation on the early modern Egyptian prose writer, Muhammad al- Muwaylihi (published by the State University of New York Press in 1974 and now republished in a second edition as A Period of Time, Reading, England: Garnet Press, 1992). Since emigrating to the United States in 1968 he has specialized in two areas: Arabic Literature, with particular reference to narrative and drama; and Arabic language pedagogy. Besides a major study on the Arabic Novel (Syracuse University Press, 1982) and an anthology of critical writings, Modern Arabic Literature, Library of Literary Criticism Series (New York: Ungar Publishing Company, 1985), he has published over thirty articles on Arabic literature. He has produced a number of translations of modern Arabic narrative, including Najib Mahfuz's Mirrors (1977) and Autumn Quail (1985), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's The Ship (1985, with Adnan Haydar), `Abd al-rahman Munif's Endings (1988), and collections of short stories by Najib Mahfuz and Yusuf Idris. As guest-editor of many of journals he has also encouraged the publication of a large number of other translations. He currently serves on the Administrative Board of The Project for the Translation of Arabic (PROTA, directed by Dr. Salma Khadra' al- Jayyusi) and is a member of the editorial boards of Al-`Arabiyya (Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic), World Literature Today and the Journal of Arabic Literature.
Roger Allen
is a certified Arabic proficiency tester for the American Council for the
Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and in 1986 was asked to serve as
ACTFL's national Trainer of Testers. Since then he has led a large number
of workshops on language teaching and learning, involving materials preparation,
classroom instruction, and testing. Along with Adel Allouche he has completed
a proficiency-based textbook for standard Arabic using computer- assisted
instructional methods, Let's Learn Arabic [1988].
He
currently serves
as Professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Asian
and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He also chairs
the Language Advisory Committee of the School of Arts and Sciences and
is Co-Director of the International Studies Program [Wharton and School
of Arts & Sciences). He is organist and choirmaster of St. Mary's Episcopal
Church, Hamilton Village, Philadelphia.