We are delighted to announce that Professor Kathryn Babayan has been appointed as the new director of the Center for Armenian Studies (CAS), effective July 1, 2025, and to bid a fond farewell to outgoing Director Gottfried Hagen as he assumes his new role as Chair of Middle East Studies. 

Professor 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 was previously the Director of the Armenian Studies Program from 2012-2019 and has served for many years on the center’s executive committee. Babayan received her PhD from Princeton University.  

She has recently 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.

Babayan’s research on majmu’a (anthology) is part of a larger collaboration with fellow Safavid historian Nozhat Ahmadi, at the University of Isfahan. Together they have begun to collect and generate tables of contents for numerous majmu’a that are housed in Tehran’s most prominent public libraries of Majlis, Malik, Milli and Tehran University. The Isfahan Anthology Project stems from Babayan’s 2021 book (for which she was awarded the 2022 Honorable Mention, Fatma Mernissi Book Award, Middle Eastern Studies Association) entitled, The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021). 

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).

Welcome, Kathryn!