Dr Cameron Cross 

IAS Fellow at Trevelyan College, January - March 2026

Contact Details

• Home Institution email: kchalipa@umich.edu
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC 

Cameron Cross (he/they) is Associate Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr Cross’s main area of research is narrative literature of the medieval or middle period (roughly 800–1250 CE), focusing on Persian and Arabic but with an eye on the wider context, such as the literatures of Georgia, Byzantium, western Europe, and India. Much of Dr Cross’s work has been directed towards building bridges and facilitating dialogue between specialists in these various traditions.

Dr Cross’s first monograph, Love at a Crux: The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press), is their most extended effort in this direction. Using the influential but undervalued love-story Vis & Ramin (w. 1054) as a focal point, Cross situates this work not only at the crossroads of intersecting literary traditions (Greek, Arabic, and Middle Persian), but also at the ‘crux’ of the Afro-Eurasian romance tradition writ large. In this work, we can observe new deployments of the love-story that gave it philosophical and theological purchase in ways that compare well against similar developments in adjacent regions, showing how these texts often speak a common language even without recourse to a shared literary idiom.

Many of Dr Cross’s articles explore these connections from a more targeted angle. Their 2015 publication, ‘Illicit Rage’ (Iranian Studies) compares narratorial anxieties about fate and theodicy across Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh; in 2016, their article ‘The Many Colors of Love’ (Interfaces) takes a similar look at love-theory, examining cases drawn from the Qur’an, Arabic love poetry, Augustine, Dante, and Gottfried von Strassburg to set up a close reading of Nezami Ganjavi’s Haft Paykar (w. ca. 1209). In 2024, he published two articles that continue this broad comparative work: ‘Spiderweb Stories’  (The Medieval Globe) draws out the faint but sticky connections between two well-travelled and highly popular texts of the middle period, Floire & Blancheflor and Varqa & Golshah, while ‘Poetic Alchemy’ (Medieval Encounters) explores the role of versification in the rise of Persian love-stories, with comparative sketches drawn of Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, and Byzantine literature. One of Dr Cross’s ongoing research projects is directed at another well-travelled text, the ancient Greek novel Metiochos & Parthenope, which found its way into Persian a millennium later as Vameq & Azra (w. ca. 1030): not how, but why this text received elite attention in this new context is the question he hopes to answer.

Beyond the realm of comparative narratives, Dr Cross’s other major area of interest lies at the intersection of gender, animality, and monstrosity in a variety of genres: romance of course, but also epic, travel literature, and wonders of the world.  To that end, he has published an article on kingship and masculinity (‘A Tree Atop the Mountain,’ Iran Namag 2018), and a forthcoming work on human-monster metamorphoses (‘How to Tame a Dragon,’ postmedieval).  This is something he hopes to pursue during their time as an IAS fellow.

Dr Cross holds a B.A. from the University of Colorado (History and Italian, 2004), two M.As from the University of Chicago (2007 and 2010), and a PhD from the University of Chicago (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2015).

While in Durham Dr Cross will collaborate with colleagues from Archaeology, English Studies and Modern Languages and Cultures to consider the cultural and social impact of former eras in the 21st century, and how this interacts with academic discourses that study those periods.

Events

TBC