About

Cameron Cross is an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, based at the Department of Middle East Studies. He earned his Ph.D. from The University of Chicago in 2015. His research focuses on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East within the temporal framework of Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period (ca. 500–1500 CE). His primary area of expertise is Persian, and he also examines texts in Arabic, Greek, Georgian, and the languages of western Europe, including Latinate and Germanic languages. Cross's work aims to understand how these various literary traditions interacted with one another and their audiences. His current research is dedicated to the genres of epic and romance, exploring how these genres are defined and what insights such definitions provide. He investigates questions related to composition, performance, subjectivity, morality, gender, society, and cross-cultural intertextuality through these texts. Cross emphasizes the importance of Persian texts in revealing how issues of selfhood and subjectivity were interrogated via literary modes that gained prominence across courtly cultures in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE. Beyond his focus on historical texts, he is interested in the art and literature of modern Iran and its neighboring regions, including comparative studies of neoclassical poetry, the free-verse movement, cinema, literary history, and various narrative forms such as novels, novellas, and short stories in Persian and Arabic. His current projects include a monograph on the narrative poem Vis & Ramin by Fakhroddin Gorgani, which investigates the emergence of the romance genre and the concept of romantic love as an ethical practice. The work explores themes such as female chastity, male sovereignty, sacrifice, and redemption, and re-examines the tradition of minstrelsy in Parthian and Sasanian literature, analyzing how oral performance elements interface with written texts. He is also working on articles related to the rise of the romance in Persian, Greek, and European literature, the implications of Alexander’s quest for immortality, and themes of love, holy war, speech, silence, and monsters in various literary works. Additionally, Cross is engaged in translating works including ‘Ayyuqi’s Varqa & Golshah and contemporary prose and poetry. In terms of teaching, Cross has instructed courses on Middle Eastern geography, history, and ethnography through travel writing; Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh; modern Persian poetry; Iranian cinema; and Persian literature in translation. He plans to offer future courses on Rumi, animals and monsters in Islamic literature, and comparative romances.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Literature
• Psychology
• Visual arts
• Classics
• Psychoanalysis
• Philosophy
• Theology

Selected publications

• Esordi del romanzo persiano: dal <i>Vis e Rāmin</i> di Gorgāni (XI sec.) al ciclo di Tristano. Nahid Norozi. (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2021.) Pp. 516. €40 paperback. ISBN 9788836131471

  Iranian Studies · 2025-07-01

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  Esordi del romanzo persiano: dal Vis e Rāmin di Gorgāni (XI sec.) al ciclo di Tristano. Nahid Norozi. (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2021.) Pp. 516. €40 paperback. ISBN 9788836131471 - Volume 58 Issue 3

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• How to tame a dragon: The ontology of evil in early Persian epic

  postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies · 2025-03-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Review of Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry

  Journal of the American Oriental Society · 2024-03-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  &#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry. By Domenico Ingenito. Leiden: Brill, 2021. Pp. xx + 697, illus. $132, €110 (cloth).&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

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• Poetic Alchemy: the Rise of Romance from a Persian Perspective

  Medieval Encounters · 2024 · 3 citations

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  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  Abstract The eleventh and twelfth centuries witnessed either the rise or revival of long-form amorous narratives in at least four courtly language traditions across the southwestern flank of Eurasia: Persian, Georgian, Greek, and French. This coeval occurrence of the “rise of romance” offers fruitful grounds for considering broad literary-historical questions about genre, poetics, and interconnectivity in a comparative fashion. The aim of this article is to give an account of this phenomenon in the early Persian context, with special attention to the role of poetry in transforming popular tales into elite literature. Understanding the implications of this practice may shed some light on possible factors contributing to the romance’s (re-)emergence in other twelfth-century literary traditions. As a coda, this article suggests twelfth-century Anatolia and Syria as significant contact zones where all four of the courtly languages mentioned above would have had some opportunity to interact.

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• Recognize, Re-cognize: Theme and Genre in Teaching Persian Literature

  2024-07-31

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• Notes

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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  I owe this idea of "memories that rhyme" to a podcast I listened to in the summer of 2021 entitled Dolly Parton's America , hosted by Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee.The phrase came from Episode 4, "Neon Moss," and the transcript reads, "And bears aside, the whole time I couldn't shake this feeling like I had been here before.Like, it was something like deja vu but not quite.Maybe more like a rhyme, the way that one memory rhymes with another."See https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/dolly-partons-america/episodes/neon-moss (accessed 1 June 2022).Alex J. West persuasively argues for a "Hemispheric Middle Ages" as a framework for comparative historical study, adding that this is best accomplished by working from the understanding that "medieval greater Afro-Eurasia was ultimately one place."See https://indomedieval .medium.com/the-hemispheric-middle-ages-part-i-173779f237f6 and https://indomedieval.medium.com/the-hemispheric-middle-ages-part-ii-7f1630e00e12 (accessed 1 June 2022).The dating of Vis & Rāmin to the Parthian period was achieved by Minorsky's painstaking research, published in a series of articles for the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1946, 1947, 1954, and 1962), then consolidated, lightly revised, and re-published in his Iranica (1964).The medieval histories Tārikh-e gozida (w.1330) and Mojmal al-tavārikh (w.1126) set the tale in the reigns of the Parthians (Gotarzes I, r. 91-80 bce) and Sasanians (Shapur I, r. 240-70 ce), respectively; see Mostowfi Qazvini, Tārikh-e gozida , 101; Najmābādi and Weber, Mujmal al-tavārīkh , 74.Interestingly, the name of Gotarzes's son and successor, Orodes/Wērōd, aligns with the name of Vis's brother, Viru.Notes to pages 14-17 inform the composition of diverse travel narratives, such as Ibn Baṭṭuṭa's Riḥla and The Book of John Mandeville.Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying , 5. Mallette, Lives of the Great Languages , 82.I borrow the juxtaposition of "roots" versus "routes" from Kinoshita, "Romance in/and the Medieval Mediterranean," 192, 202.Agapitos and Mortensen, "Introduction," 6-7.It is worth noting that the authors are specifically referring to medieval Europe in this sentence, but they go on to discuss how the Islamic lands fit into this complex in the following paragraph.The field of New Mediterranean Studies offers a helpful model for this kind of scholarship; see Akbari, "Modeling Medieval World Literature"; Mallette, "Translation in the Pre-Modern World"; Kinoshita, "Romance in/ and the Medieval Mediterranean."Another highly productive circle for me has been the push to recognize the supralocal role of "imperial" languages in making possible the transregional circulation of stories and texts: see Gaunt, "French Literature Abroad"; Agapitos, "Contesting Conceptual Boundaries"; Høgel, "World Literature Is Trans-Imperial"; Mallette, Lives of the Great Languages .Many of these cycles stem from Sanskrit sources, a reminder that the Helleno-Abrahmic complex is only one of many possible ways of framing literary globality in the medieval period.Some useful studies that situate transregional narratives such as Barlaam & Josaphat , Kalīla & Dimna, the Alexander romance, and the Seven Sages within globally minded frameworks include Lopez and McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha ; de Blois, Burzōy's Voyage to India ; Stoneman, Nawotka, and Wojciechowska, The Alexander Romance ; Hoffmann, "Cats and Dogs, Manliness, and Misogyny."Selden, "Mapping the Alexander Romance," 19.See Heng, Empire of Magic , 2-4, and of course the rest of the book.Similarly, Samuel Lasman's recent dissertation explores, in a comparative manner, the role of fantastic and imaginative narratives about the past, what he calls "speculative fiction," in parallel processes of identity formations in the medieval period; for his theoretical framing of how the project speaks to and indeed requires a "Global Middle Ages," see Lasman, "Dragons, Fairies, and Time," 3-43.Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity , 82-90; Whitmarsh, Dirty Love .Keene, "Introduction," 31.On the relationship between medieval studies and white nationalism, see the collected essays in Albin et al., Whose Middle Ages? ; Heng and Ramey, "Early Globalities, Global Literatures," 392; Heng, The Invention of Race , esp.1-5 and 15-24; Lomuto, "Becoming Notes to pages 17-19 Postmedieval," 503-5 (and associated references); Phillips, Craft Beer Culture , 97-135.See Krueger, "Introduction," 1; Gaunt, "Romance and Other Genres," 45; Fuchs, Romance, 37; Agapitos, "Genre, Structure and Poetics," 20-2.Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception , 23-4.See, respectively, Rust'aveli, The Man in the Panther's Skin , 2/ ¶7; Agapitos, The Tale of Livistros and Rodamne , 55/6-9; Hubert, Floire and Blanchefleur , 23/1-6.As Matilda Bruckner succinctly observes, "That romance speaks to lovers is a staple of the genre"; see Bruckner, "The Shape of Romance in Medieval France," 17. Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan (tr.Hatto), 42.Frow, Genre , 7-8.For genres as "institutions" and "ideologies," see respectively Todorov, "The Origin of Genres," 162; Jameson, "Magical Narratives," 135.Jameson argues that every text necessarily encodes and embodies some kind of ideological formation ( The Political Unconscious , 79), a point that Simon Gaunt develops in the context of Old French literature (see Gaunt, "Romance and Other Genres"; Gaunt, Gender and Genre , 10).Bakhtin's use of ideology -a "system of ideas" in which "every speaker is thus an ideologue and every utterance an ideologeme" ( Speech Genres and Other Late Essays , 101n3) -seems to me the most appropriate way to discuss ideology in my context; but ultimately, the premodern Greek term ethos , as a "custom" or "way" of doing things, provides by far the closest conceptual match with the Persian material, a discourse that is saturated with discussions of various "paths" or "manners" ( maẕ hab, ṭariqa, āyin, ravesh , etc.) of thought and action.Trzaskoma, Two Novels from Ancient Greece , xix.For the use of the words "idealistic" and "idyllic" to describe this mythos, see Holzberg, The Ancient Novel , 9-10; Hubert, Floire and Blanchefleur , 13-16.The lexicographer Dehkhodā defines the afsāna as a story about those who lived in the past ( ḥekāyāt-e goẕ ashtagān ), but then adds that it is "baseless and false" ( bi-aṣl va dorugh ), fabricated ( sākhta ) for either didactic or entertainment purposes.Dehkhoda, Loghat-nāma, s.v.afsāna at https: //dehkhoda.ut.ac.ir/fa/

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• Bibliography

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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• 1. Phantasy: The Rise of Romance

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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  The Rise of Romance It was the autumn of 1051, and another sleepless night for Fakhr al-Din Gorgāni.For seven months, the air of Isfahan, where Gorgāni lived and worked as a poet and courtier, had reverberated with the boom and blare of drum and trumpet as one embassy after the next marched down the city's streets, paying homage to its new sultan, Ṭughrıl Beg of the house of Seljuk.From the Caesar of Constantinople came prisoners and tribute; from the King of Syria, a glittering ruby; from the Qarakhanid prince of distant Kashgar, gifts and a pact of friendship; and above all, from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, the coveted robe, banner, and rescript of investiture that proclaimed Ṭughrıl's dominion over all the lands of Islam. 1 Change was afoot, the hubbub seemed to cry, and Gorgāni might well have whiled away his hours of insomnia wondering what the future held in store, both for him and for the new political order in which he played some small part.In both scope and consequence, the changes wrought by the Seljuk Turks would indeed prove to be enormous.After overthrowing their former masters, the Ghaznavids, in what is now modern Afghanistan, the Seljuks began a highly successful campaign of westwards expansion, conquering the Iranian plateau, subduing the Islamic heartlands of Iraq and Syria, and eventually crushing the Byzantine army at the battle of Manzikert in 1071.This event marked a major turning point in the demographic and political history of the region, as it opened up Anatolia to Turkoman settlement on one hand and prompted the launch of the First Crusade on the other.One result of this domino effect was a massive shake-up of peoples and cultures: within a generation, Arabs, Greeks, Franks, Turks, Kurds, Persians, Georgians, and Armenians were intermingling in close and sustained contact, in the battlefield, the court, the bazaar, and the bedroom, engendering ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '

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• Epilogue: In Which Many a Tale Has Love

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023-12-31

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  In Which Many a Tale Has LoveTo bring this study to a close, I would like to repeat the formula invoked at its beginning.Yek-i bud, yek-i nabud : "There was one, there wasn't one," or in a more colloquial idiom, "It happened, and it didn't."Traditionally recited at the beginning of a fairy tale, this formula speaks beautifully to the liminal status of the romance within the broader arena of discursive activity in medieval Helleno-Abrahamic cultures.Did Vis, Mobad, and Rāmin really exist?How does our answer to this question change the way we read their stories, and what can we learn from them, given these multiple possible perspectives?In embracing these ambiguous questions and leveraging them to propose complex answers, Vis & Rāmin represents a landmark text, not only in the history of a genre, but in a wider set of formative developments of the early eleventh century, which included a new fascination with the ancient past, new ideas about the function of poetry and the imagination, and new ways of grappling with the perennial issue of desire.This is not the place for such a comprehensive intellectual history, but I will endeavour at least to connect the findings of this book with other recent advances in scholarship, suggesting some of the questions they might raise when placed in an interdisciplinary context.V&R is not only a text in which love has many a tale ( bedu dar ʿeshq rā chandin fasāna , 112/70 [75]), as its author claims; it also points to an emerging world beyond its diegetic borders: a world in which many a tale has love.An intriguing place to start is to consider the concurrence of the rise of romance with the life of Avicenna (d.1037).Avicenna's life itinerary dovetails in striking ways with the westwards expansion of Persian court poetry: his professional career began in Samanid Bukhara in the court of Nuḥ b.Manṣur (d.976), the same dynasty under whose patronage Ferdowsi began writing the Shāhnāma, and, after a stint in Hamadan, ended up in Isfahan, the very city where Gorgāni would compose his Vis & ' ' ' ' ' ' Epilogue 233 ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '

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• 5. History: The Death of Romantic Love

  University of Toronto Press eBooks · 2023

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  • Psychoanalysis
  • History
  • Psychology

  ' ' ' ' ' '

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Frequent coauthors

• Nina Zandjani

  1 shared

• Lorenzo Livorsi

  1 shared

• Fabrizia Baldissera

  1 shared

• Joseph Lenkart

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  1 shared

• Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir

  1 shared

• Efthymia Priki

  1 shared

• Elisabetta Bartoli

  University of Siena

  1 shared

• Paolo Borsa

  Frequentis (Germany)

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

  University of Chicago

  2015