Persian Literature & Iranian Studies
I just got back from a conference in honor of the late Dr. Heshmat Moayyad, who taught my mentor Frank Lewis and many other of my close colleagues. I had also studied with him for a couple of years before his retirement, and gave a short paper on the Arabic sources of early Persian romances, a topic I hope he would have liked. یادش به خیر.
For the full program, visit https://cmes.uchicago.edu/page/persian-and-iranian-studies-honor-heshmat-moayyad
It was a pleasure to present a new project of mine, “Grammars of Globality,” at the De-centering the Global Middle Ages symposium here at U-M. Click here for the full program, complete with bibliographies, abstracts, and other materials.
I’m excited to be giving this upcoming talk!
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON IRANIAN STUDIES
Friday November 9, 2018
Faculty House, 5:00-8:00 pm
Salvation Through Sin: How a Queen Rewrote the Rules of Romance
Cameron Cross (University of Michigan)
Dr. Cameron Cross is an Assistant Professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the comparative study of narrative in the Middle East within the temporal parameter of Late Antiquity to the Early Modern period (ca. 500–1500 CE).
This talk offers a theoretical reappraisal of the New Persian romance, a genre that experienced a sudden and dynamic efflorescence in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century. In revisiting the question of genre (and “romance” as a viable term) in the Persian context, I hope to reorient our account of this moment in time, from a vertical axis of national literary history to a horizontal view situating these texts within a broad system of literary habits and practices that extended from Ghazni to Paris (and likely beyond). As an example of this approach, I offer the case of Vis & Râmin, a story that demonstrates a clear awareness of this intertextual tradition, which had been developed and circulated in languages like Greek, Latin, and Arabic (and thence into Persian, Georgian, and the European vernaculars) over the longue durée of the first millennium CE. One reason for the poem’s significance is not simply that it knows this tradition, but indeed takes the embedded metaphysics, politics, and ethics of the romance genre as its main object of study. By manipulating romantic conventions into the paradox that its heroine must choose adultery to prove her virtue, Vis & Râmin probes the coherence of its own world-view, opening vistas of individual choice and moral ambivalence hitherto unexplored in romance literature—Persian or otherwise.
I’m excited to be participating in an Armenian Studies Program-sponsored panel within the Fall 2018 Mediterranean Seminar, giving a paper entitled “The Girl Next Door: Reading the Margin as a Site of Continuity.” You can download the print version of the program here, and for further details, visit the conference page at https://ii.umich.edu/islamicstudies/news-events/events/conferences.html.
We are very excited to announce the program for the 2018 Great Lakes Adiban Workshop, an intercollegiate organization of which the University of Michigan is an important participant, scheduled to take place at the University of Chicago, October 5–6. The program is attached below, and you can visit https://greatlakesadiban.github.io/ for more information about the Adiban and their goals.
Time: Saturday–Sunday, October 6–7, 9:30am–5:00pm
Location: 3rd Floor Lecture Hall / Swift Hall, 1025 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637
9:30–10:10 / Kaveh Hemmat (Benedictine U) – China in the Iranian Epic Tradition (1000-1500): Cultural Geography and the Concept of Adab
10:15–10:55 / Aria Fani (U of California, Berkeley) – What is Adabiyat? The Genealogy of a Discourse of Literature (1860-1960)
11:00–11:40 / Paul Losensky (Indiana U) – Why Kings Need Poets: Negotiating Identity and Patronage in the Saqi-nameh of Zohuri Torshizi
Lunch Break
1:00–1:40 / Ali Noori (U of Pennsylvania) – Sabk-i Hindi or Tāza-Gū’ī: Reading Sahābī Astarābādī Today
1:45–2:25 / Shaahin Pishbin (U of Chicago) – Mīrzā Jalāl Asīr and the Poetics of the “Imaginative Style” (Ṭarz-i Khayāl)
Coffee Break
2:45–3:25 / Ayelet Kotler (U of Chicago) – Clear Meaning, Simple Persian: A Philological Inquiry into a Mughal Translator’s Work
3:30–4:10 / Pouye Khoshkhoosani (Northwestern U) – Shi‘ism and Kingship in Safavid Court Poetry
4:15–4:55 / Zahra Sabri (McGill U) – Three Shi‘a Poets: Sect-related Themes in Pre-modern Urdu Poetry
9:30–10:10 / Cameron Cross (U of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – “I Know It When I See It”: Towards a Theory of the Romance Genre
10:15–10:55 / Rachel Schine (U of Chicago) – Nourishing the Noble: A Tale of Breastfeeding and Hero-Making in Arabic Popular Literature
11:00–11:40 / Allison Kanner (U of Chicago) – Majnun’s Animal Kingdom: Desert Wanderings in the Kitāb al-Aghānī and Niẓāmī’s Laylī o Majnūn
Lunch Break
1:00–1:40 / Esraa al-Shammari (U of Pennsylvania) – Images Dispossessed: Tīh of Tropes in Abū Tammām’s Ghazal
1:45–2:25 / Sabeena Shaikh (McGill U) – Selfhood or Seduction: Reading Urdu Poetry as ‘Autobiography’
Coffee Break
2:45–3:25 / Alexandra Hoffmann (U of Chicago) – Cross-dressing in Samak-e ʿAyyār
3:30–3:50 / Samuel Lasman (U of Chicago) – In the Maw of the Nahang: Sea Monsters and Subjectivity in Classical Persian Epic
4:15–4:55 / Open discussion, matters arising, future plans
The Great Lakes Adiban Society (GLAS) invites submissions for its second annual workshop, scheduled to take place at the University of Chicago, October 6–7, 2018. We particularly welcome papers that are works in progress and would benefit from extensive discussion and feedback.
The Society hopes to provide a regional forum for scholars of Islamicate adab, particularly of the medieval and early modern periods, to meet and share their work. We leave our parameters intentionally broad in order to invite as wide a collaboration as can be useful, but we are basically engaged with the literatures of the broad complex of premodern Muslim societies from the Danube to the Deccan. This naturally includes the major Islamicate languages of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as others (Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.) that participate in similar literary conventions. We welcome and encourage scholars working in any of these languages to consider participating!
Those who wish to participate in the workshop should fill out our online application by August 15, 2018. Please note that each accepted paper will be given 45 minutes for presentation and discussion; because of this, we have limited space on our schedule and may have to turn down some submissions if get too many. In such an event, preference will generally be given to scholars in the Great Lakes region, per the mission of this organization.
Graduate students note: we have some funding to help offset at least part of your travel costs! If you would like to apply for this additional aid, there is a space to do so on the application form.
If you have any questions, please feel free to write Cameron Cross at kchalipa [at] umich.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!
This is my last article for at least a while: a reception history of the romance Vis & Rāmin, covering the near-millennium since it was written in 1050 CE up to scholarship and criticism on it today. I focus on matters of its circulation, popularity, influence, legacy, and place in the classical canon over the passage of time. I hope you like it! Here is the reference:
Cross, Cameron. “The Lives and Afterlives of Vis and Rāmin.” Iranian Studies 51, no. 4 (2018): 517–56. DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2018.1440967.
And, as it happens, Taylor & Francis has given me 50 copies to share for free. If you want to read the article (and you don’t already have access to Iranian Studies via an institutional subscription), you can get your copy (if any remain) by clicking here.
I’m pleased to announce the publication of a new article, part of a special issue in the journal Iran Namag on the topic of Iranian masculinities. It was a great project to be involved with and I’m honored to have been a part of it. To access the article, you can visit its website or download the PDF here.
Reference:
Cross, Cameron. “A Tree Atop the Mountain: Mobad Manikan and the Elusive Promises of Masculinity.” Iran Namag 3, no. 1 (2018): xxvi–lxiii.
I am pleased to announce my latest article has been published by Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, in a special issue dedicated to love. My contribution is entitled “The Many Colors of Love in Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar: Beyond the Spectrum”, and it deals with Islamicate love-theory and its application in the stories of the Black and White Domes in the Haft Paykar. Read it here.
Whew, it’s been a while since I’ve posted! It’s been a busy year. Anyways, I’m giving a talk with my colleague Samer Ali on two poems written on the arch of Ctesiphon; see the announcement below.
Reading the Ruins: Two Poems on the Arch of Ctesiphon
Samer Ali, associate professor of Arabic language and literature, U-M; Cameron Cross, assistant professor of Iranian studies, U-M
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
4:00-5:30 PM
1644 School of Social Work Building
On the banks of the Tigris river, the Sasanian Empire left an iconic monument called the Arch of Khosrow (Taq-i-Kasra or Iwan Kisra), whose vault towered like the heavens at 121 feet. Two poets, al-Buhturi (d. 897) and Khaqani (d. 1190), gravitated toward this site and composed two timeless odes, one in Arabic and the other in Persian, on the Arch as a memorial to a bygone civilization — or the very idea of civilization itself. In these poems, we find that Time (and Fate) play an ominous role, crushing the genius and labor of human beings on both an individual and collective scale. How, then, do the two poets respond to this? How do the ravages of Time generate new ethical and political imperatives for humanity? In this workshop, we place the poems in conversation with each other in order to address these and other questions of art, life, and meaning.
Professors Samer Ali and Cameron Cross will present and discuss their own translations of these poems.
