Kathryn Babayan

Kathryn Babayan is a professor of early modern Safavid Iran at the University of Michigan. Her research is on the social and cultural history of the Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies and the history of sexuality.

Education

Babayan graduated with a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1993. with a dissertation on the waning of the Qizilbash, spiritual disciples and the military backbone of the Safavi state .

Career

Babayan's scholarship began with a focus on mysticism and messianic beliefs in the early Persianate world. She published several academic articles on the subject in the mid 1990s. This ultimately led to her first book titled Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs in 2002 that addresses the political, religious, and cultural history of early modern Safavi Iran. The book explored the occult economy to understand how time was scripted in the writing of history and enacted in popular messianic uprisings. The book’s central problematic was the social dimension of the “sacred.” She was interested in how social environments in Safavi Iran (1501-1722) shaped different styles of sacrality, and how resulting notions of sacred authority gave rise to new religious and political formations. With a socially inflected perspective, her reading of the language of sovereignty and heresy complicated a historiography of the early modern Islamic world that had previously relied on a static view of scriptural Islam to understand the past. . Her research then moved to the study of slaves ghulam elites who influenced the development of the Safavid Empire. This resulted in her collaborative 2004 book Slaves of the Shah with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad.

In a second collaboration, with her colleague Afsaneh Najamabadi they co-edited Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Islamicate Sexualities is the outcome of a workshop they organized at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies in 2003. Their conversations moved across the disciplines of history and literature, through diverse geographies (North Africa, Iberia and Eurasia), and across the temporal frames of modern and premodern. Two historians, two literature and two comparative literature scholars, together with three queer theorists entered into a two-day conversation in an effort to bring western queer theory into dialogue with materially localized readings of sexuality in the Islamicate world. Collectively questioning their translation of eroticism, sociability, and sexual sensibility beyond Foucauldian frames of sexuality, western scientia sexualis and eastern ars erotica, the volume proposed alternative paradigms to help found a new field of Islamicate sexuality studies. Islamicate sexualities.

Babayan's new work on the history of sexuality and specifically eroticism in early modern Iran resulted in her studying household anthologies collected during the seventeenth century in Isfahan. These anthologies are sprinkled with talismans, love poetry, and recipes that blur the lines between professional and private lives. Babayan reads household anthologies as verbal and visual archives of an entwined urban and erotic form of knowledge, typically overlooked in the historiography of seventeenth-century Isfahan. This research culminated in her 2021 book The City As Anthology.

After the publication of this book, Babayan began working on the Isfahan Anthology Project at the University of Michigan to collect a data base for the study of Safavi anthologies, referred to as majmu’a, along with her colleague at the University of Isfahan historian Nozhat Ahmadi. The goal is to create a digital platform that academics around the world can contribute to and also access the combined anthologies for their own research. She also received in 2024 a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to fund her next book publication titled The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins, which investigates the differing reading practices within that early period of Isfahan.

Bibliography

• — (2002). Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran. Harvard University Press. p. 575. ISBN 9780932885289.
• —; Babaie, Sussan; Baghdiantz-MacCabe, Ina; Mussumeh, Farhad (2004). Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran. I.B. Tauris. p. 256. ISBN 9780857716866.
• —; Najmabadi, Afsaneh, eds. (2008). Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire. Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University. p. 376. ISBN 9780674032040.
• —; Pifer, Michael, eds. (2018). An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion. Springer International Publishing. p. 337. ISBN 9783319728650.
• — (2021). The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan. Stanford University Press. p. 280. ISBN 9781503627833.