About

Kathryn Babayan is a social and cultural historian specializing in the early-modern Persianate world, with particular expertise in gender studies and the history of sexuality. She earned her PhD from Princeton University in 1993 and is currently a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, where she is affiliated with Middle East Studies, Armenian Studies, and Comparative Literature. Babayan's research focuses on urban and household culture, as exemplified by her work on anthologies and urban space in early modern Isfahan. Her notable projects include the Isfahan Anthology Project, which aims to create a digital platform for Persianate family archives, and her award-winning book, The City as Anthology, which examines urbanity and eroticism in early modern Isfahan. She has also authored Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs, and co-edited volumes on Islamicate sexualities and the Armenian Mediterranean. Babayan's scholarship combines historiographies of the book with urban studies, emphasizing gender and sexuality, and she has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for 2024-25.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Engineering
• Civil engineering
• Geography
• Art
• Psychology
• Gender studies
• History
• Social psychology
• Psychoanalysis
• Literature

Selected publications

• Gender in an Early Modern Persian Epistolary Rant

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2025-11-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article spotlights an undated epistle ascribed to a woman from the Bakhtiari family of Lurs in the vicinity of Isfahan, in southwestern Iran. It found its way to Isfahan as a collector’s item recorded in several late seventeenth-century anthologies. The vernacular language of the letter uses sexual insults to publicize her husband’s infidelity. This rant projects a female voice otherwise excluded from epistolary collections of seventeenth-century Persia.

  PublisherDOI

• Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran. Farshid Emami (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024). Pp. 276. $112.95 hardcover. ISBN 9780271095523

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2025-08-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Isfahan Anthology Project

  Iranian Studies · 2024-03-04

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Abstract The aim of the Isfahan Anthology Project is to create an inventory of, collect, and digitize all extant anthologies produced in seventeenth-century Isfahan. Thousands of majmuʿa were authored and assembled in Isfahan. Presently, we are working together with our graduate students at the University of Isfahan and the University of Michigan in a collaboration that intends to train a new generation of Safavid historians who will continue this digital project into the future. We have begun the vast project of collecting and generating tables of contents for anthologies housed in the capital's most prominent public libraries—Tehran University Library, Majlis Library, Malik Library, and the National (Milli) Library of Iran—to begin our analysis of their anthology collections. Adapting our work to include reconnaissance, we have taken careful account of the content and organization of these anthologies so that we can create a digital and searchable database of Isfahan's anthologies that allows fellow scholars and graduate students across the world to freely have access to these rich Persianate-world sources.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sholeh A. Quinn. <i>Persian Historiography across Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-01-21

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Sholeh A. Quinn. Persian Historiography across Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Get access Sholeh A. Quinn. Persian Historiography across Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. x, 252. Cloth $99.99. Kathryn Babayan Kathryn Babayan University of Michigan, USA Email: Babayan@umich.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 543–544, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad018 Published: 31 March 2023

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 5 Family Archives and Female Spaces of Intimacy

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 1 Imperial Visions of Sovereignty

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Adab of Urbanity

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Introduction defines the main terms of the book: household anthology (majmuʿa, muraqqaʿ), adab, eroticism, love, and urbanity. It places the anthologizing of Isfahan within a critical genealogy of city reading to argue that urban practices related to seeing, reading, desiring, and writing were intimately related and mutually coconstitutive, thus informing both the lived experience of the city and its (re)assembly as household anthologies. A reader’s guide to the anthologies outlines the unfolding of the narrative, which begins with the imperial Safavi project and moves to the urban media of household anthologies through eight resident authors who act as city guides.

  PublisherDOI

• The City as Anthology

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-03-29

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Disturbing the City

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Chapter 3 mediates the opposing views of the imperial imaginary and the city of Isfahan as allegories of the spiritual journey to paradise. The cleric and poet Aqa Mansur Semnani (alive in 1656) visualized the city for his audience through the poetic form of the shahrashub, literally “city disturbance.” This chapter focuses on how the effort to create ideological unity in Shah Abbas I’s rebuilding of Isfahan could be unsettled by Aqa Mansur’s work, preserved in anthologies, and considers the degree to which the imperial project was real, or lived, or successful. Deploying a new form of authority based on the vitality of embodied experiences, Aqa Mansur’s literary experiment challenged the imperial vision, using ʿishq, love that is desiring, and irony to reimagine the city of power as the very symbol of transcendent authority.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 4 Cultivating and Disciplining Friendship Letter

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jamal J. Elias

  1 shared

• Nozhat Ahmadi

  University of Isfahan

  1 shared

• Anna Vanzan

  1 shared

• C. Edmund Bosworth

  1 shared

• Rudi Matthee

  University of Delaware

  1 shared

• Melanie S. Tanielian

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Sonja Brentjes

  1 shared

• Muhammad A. Dandamayev

  1 shared

Education

• 1993, Near Eastern Studies

  Princeton University

  1993

Awards & honors

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH/Mellon) Fellowshi…
• Fellow, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Universi…
• Honorable Mention, Fatma Mernissi Book Award, Middle Eastern…
• LSA Research funding in the Humanities for Isfahan Anthology…
• LSA Humanities Collaborative 5 x 5 Incubator Grant for Digit…