Joseph J. Cross

Joseph J. Cross

I research the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Egyptian literature. Interested in the poetics of ancient literature and its political unconscious. PhD Chicago, 2022.

I appreciate your interest in who I am!

I am a philologist and scholar of ancient literature, who specializes in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature, as well as literature from Ancient Egypt. My current position is a researcher on the European Research Council-funded project From Texts to Literature: Demotic Egyptian Papyri and the Formation of the Hebrew Bible (DEMBIB) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; see the page for my project and subproject here, as well as my team member page. I received my PhD in 2022 from the University of Chicago, Department of Near Eastern Languages, where I completed the doctoral programs in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East as well as in Egyptology, specializing in Demotic. My dissertation was entitled “The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella.” Prior to Chicago, I studied classics and theology.

My primary research interest is the literature of storytelling, both its poetics and its socio-cultural setting, specifically what Frederic Jameson calls its “political unconscious.” The kinds of questions that animate my readings are, you could say, transcendental: what allows certain genres or trends in poetics to have meaning and value for certain communities of authors and readers? How is the ancient experience of literature part of the experience of individuality, or group membership, or incorporation into larger world systems? How can we even define or approximate what that experience was, as moderns? In my publications, I work from the perspectives of philology, narratology, and close reading to develop new readings in ancient (works of) literature and new perspectives on ancient (systems of) literature, and thereby try to suggest answers to these questions. My research has implications for wider, cross-disciplinary questions in ancient studies, such as the origin of the novel. Within the discipline of biblical studies, my research means laying groundwork for and making advances in the comparison of biblical and Egyptian literature, which has historically been of secondary importance to Mesopotamian literature for understanding the world of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature. Now it is clear that Demotic Egyptian literature represents an almost untapped source of fruitful comparison for biblical scholars, and that both Judeans and Egyptians in the Persian and Hellenistic periods were not simply producing “late,” culturally inferior literature when dominated by foreign empires (as was typically held by both biblicists and Egyptologists well into the 20th century), but shared a subjectivity of indigeneity in creative dialogue with cosmopolitan world systems as well as with traditional culture and religion. This field has lay fallow for too long.

My current research focuses on novellas written by Judeans in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and by Egyptians in Demotic, during the Achaemenian and Hellenistic periods. These novellas represent one of the world’s earliest international literary movements of novelistic storytelling. For me, this body of literature is the ideal case study for the broader questions I am interested in: they provide a coherent literary-historical corpus of analysis, a graspable and recoverable literary experience (complex and learned individual works of literary storytelling) that has a shared socio-cultural and -historical basis. This needs to be justified, of course, which is part of the work of my first book, a substantial revision of my dissertation. The rest of this book entails a close comparison of the poetics of plot construction in these novellas, where contribute substantially to a historical or diachronic narratology of short-form story literature. Texts of particular centrality to my work at the moment are Esther and the Demotic novella of P. Spiegelberg (known by specialists as “The Battle for the Prebend of Amun”). For other examples of my research, see my list of publications and keep an eye on this site’s blog.

My other interests include the interaction and parallels between Ancient Egyptian culture and cultures of the Ancient Levant, including Israel and the Hebrew Bible and beyond. I am also interested in the practice of magic and its textual culture in ancient societies. Finally, I also actively engage in historicizing past literary criticism and histories of literature, especially in the disciplines of biblical studies and Egyptology, in the context of 18th-19th century intellectual history, and in theoretical currents of the 20th century.

Previously to working in Berlin, I was a Public Outreach and Content Specialist for the Education Department of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago from 2015-2020, where I taught continuing education courses, gave public lectures on the Ancient Near East throughout the Chicago area, and provided expertise for the museum’s docent program. Additionally, I conducted research for the Chicago Demotic Dictionary and for the Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research project at the Oriental Institute. From 2016-2018, I taught in the Writing Program at the University of Chicago and won the Karen Dinal Memorial Award. From 2018-2020, at the University of North Carolina Asheville, I taught in the Dept. of Classics and in the Humanities Program. At the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, I recently taught a course (with my colleague Stefanie Eisenmann) a course entitled “Ancient Magic in Text and Archaeology.”

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With gratitude for your attention, ~Joey