Karla Mallette is a scholar of medieval Mediterranean literature, with an emphasis on contacts between Italy and the Arab world. She is the author of The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and co-editor of A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History (University of Toronto Press, 2013). She is currently working on a comparative study of the two great cosmopolitan languages of the medieval Mediterranean, Latin and Arabic, entitled Lives of the Great Languages. She is Professor of Italian and Near Eastern Languages and Director of the Islamic Studies Program at the University of Michigan.