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’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. Indexing the various genres of texts that comprise each majmu’a, they consider the content and organization of these family archives, and plan to create a digital platform for their Isfahan Anthology Project, where scholars across the world may have access freely to these Persianate-world sources.

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). The City as Anthology offers a model to study early modern urban culture through anthologies collected in Isfahan’s households. It combines historiographies of the book with scholarship on urban space to intervene in contemporary discussions about experience and materiality from the vantage point of gender and sexuality.

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).

Affiliation(s)

• Middle East Studies
• Armenian Studies
• Comparative Literature

Fields of Study

• Early Modern Iran
• Gender & Sexuality
• Shi’ism
• Sufism
• Manuscript Studies

Awards

• _{2024-25 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH/Mellon) Fellowship}
• _{2022-23 Fellow, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, University of Michigan}
• _{2022 Honorable Mention, Fatma Mernissi Book Award, Middle Eastern Studies Association for my book, The City as Anthology}
• _{2022 LSA Research funding in the Humanities for Isfahan Anthology Project}
• _{2022 LSA Humanities Collaborative 5 x 5 Incubator Grant for Digital Family Archives}
• _{2018 Richard Hudson Research Professorship Award, Department of History, University of Michigan}

Selected Publications:

Books

• _{Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).}

• _{Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran. Joint monograph with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).}

• _{Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Co-editor with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge: Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, 2008).}

• _{An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion. Co-editor with Michael Pifer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Mediterranean Perspectives, 2018).}

• _{The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).}