Kathryn Babayan

Kathryn Babayan is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She has just received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2024-25) for her current project entitled, The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins which is a gendered history of reading practices in early modern Isfahan. Its centerpiece is a single Persian household anthology authored in the first half of the seventeenth century by a judge, who collects legal documents in Persian with Arabic formulas for marriage, divorce, sales, and rent contracts – tools he used to settle the everyday cases brought before him. A century later, this family anthology was sold in the bazaar and repossessed by new owners who wrote into the folios to make it their own. Multiple seals, inscriptions, and dates mark the life of the anthology, as a text, passing from one hand to another well into the twentieth century, when lithography and print took over the economy of the book in Isfahan.

Babayan is the author of another award-winning book, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2003). She has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran, with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), and co-edited two books Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge M.A.: Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion with Michael Pifer (Cham, Switzerland: Palgarve Macmillan, 2018).