The New Persian Romance in a Global Middle Ages

with Cameron Cross

In the early tenth century CE, a remarkable literary event took place, in which well-known stories of lovers were recast by court-affiliated poets as independent versified works in the emergent New Persian language.

With a focus on the remarkable story of Vis & Ramin, this talk seeks to situate that event in the broader context of the entangled literary histories of southwestern Afro-Eurasia from late antiquity to the medieval period, showing how the Persian corpus plays a crucial role in the history of romance writing at large.

About the speaker:

Cameron Cross is an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he teaches classes on Persian literature, Iranian studies, and the culture and history of the Middle East more broadly. His research interests centre on the literary traditions of the “Nile to Oxus” region from about 800–1200 CE (200–700 AH), though he also works with classical and late antique texts on one hand and early modern and modern texts on the other. His research interests include the comparative study of narrative, theories of love, desire, and affect, animal and monster studies, and the social functions of poetry. His first monograph, Love at a Crux, was published by University of Toronto Press in 2023.