Professor Kathryn Babayan from Michigan University will give an online lecture titled "Desiring İsfahan: On Seeing, Reading and Writing the Early Modern City".

What does it mean when we claim that Sufism was ubiquitous in the early modern Persianate world? My talk will take you into the optics of Sufism, a prism through which residents of Isfahan learned to see the beauty of the city, realized how to read eros in its beauty, cultivated desire for the coy gestures of the beloved, and studied the protocols of writing love in letters to friends. Schooled in the politics and aesthetics of Isfahan, residents deployed different media to embody what I have termed "urbanity," displaying their mastery of the adab of sociability and flaunting their knowledge of the city and its ways. These intimately entangled acts—seeing, reading, desiring, and writing—converge to fashion the urban self through the sensual and the sexual.

Kathryn Babayan specializes in the history and culture of the medieval and 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 (Cambridge M.A.: 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 (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). Her new book is titled, The City as Anthology: Eroticism & Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan (Palo Alto CA.: Stanford University Press, 2021).

Please click here to register for the conference.