Professor McAllister is an associate professor in the department of German and Russian at Wake Forest University. He joined the faculty in August, 2001. His primary research interests focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, with specific emphasis on Heinrich von Kleist, early Romantic aesthetic and philosophical theory, questions of gender and the formation of the subject. Since 2005 he has also been a participating faculty member of Women's and Gender Studies.

Professor McAllister's research examines how representations of alternative sexualities establish diverse discourses of self-definition that disrupt and challenge heterosexual epistemology and concepts of truth and morality.  His most recent publications are “Romantic Imagery in Tykwer’s Lola rennt,” “The Dagger is the Pen: Violence and Writing in Lessing’s Emilia Galotti,” and “Who’s Dad: Questions of Paternity in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O….”  He has also completed a monograph titled “Kleist Female Leading Characters and the Subversion of Idealist Discourse.”  Currently he is working on a manuscript that studies the role of Goethe’s theory of color as an aesthetic discourse underlying Ludwig Tieck’s representation of sexuality and self-definition. He is also working on a translation of Silvia Bovenschen's Imaginierte Weiblichkeit with Susanne Hochreiter of the University of Vienna.