2022-23 Faculty Fellow
About
Kathryn Babayan is a professor in History and Middle East Studies. She specializes in the history and culture of the early modern Persianate world, gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She is the author of Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Harvard University Press, 2003). Babayan has also co-authored Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavi Iran, with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad (I.B. Tauris, 2004); and co-edited two books: Islamicate Sexualities: Translations Across Temporal Geographies of Desire with Afsaneh Najmabadi (Harvard University Press, 2008), and An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion, with Michael Pifer (Palgarve Macmillan, 2018). Her new book is titled The City as Anthology: Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Stanford University Press, 2021).
Research Plan: Professor Babayan plans to develop the Isfahan Anthology Project and learn about the available technologies to design the digital infrastructure for the transcription of a searchable manuscript archive of seventeenth-century anthologies. She anticipates that the EIHS intellectual community will be a generative place to prepare grant applications for the digital humanities to broaden the scope of cataloging and annotating anthologies.
