CMENAS Colloquium Series. Family Archives and Female Spaces of Intimacy

In early modern Islamic history, women are often excluded from the historical record, leaving gaps in our understanding of gendered experiences. Professor Babayan explores gendered literacy and female friendship through a seventeenth-century anthology preserved in the library of the Urdubadi family, a household of poets and bureaucrats in Safavid, Iran. She argues that this anthology functions as a family archive, making visible the social world of the household in which it was compiled. Central to this archive is the role of a female family member, a widow of the Urdubadi, household whose pilgrimage to Mecca is documented alongside expressions of love for a female companion who was forced to leave Isfahan due to circulating rumors about their relationship. Through this case, Professor Babayan highlights how a ritual of sisterhood reveals an empathetic community and expands our understanding of premodern female friendships.

Kathryn Babayan specializes in the social history and culture of the early-modern Persianate world, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2024-25. Babayan is the author of two award-winning books, Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), and The City as Anthology: Eroticism & Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). Babayan has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid 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, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion with Michael Pifer (Cham, Switzerland: Palgarve Macmillan, 2018).

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