Kathryn Babayan

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Kathryn Babayan is a professor at the University of Michigan who studies early modern Iran during the Safavid era. Her work focuses on the social and cultural history of the Persianate world, with a emphasis on gender and the history of sexuality.

She earned her PhD from Princeton University in 1993, writing about the late period of the Qezelbash groups. Afterward, her research moved toward mysticism and messianic beliefs in early Persia, leading to several articles in the mid-1990s. In 2002 she published Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs, a book that explores the politics, religion, and culture of premodern Iran and how these elements shaped Persian views of their own history.

Her later research turned to Safavid Iran and the role of ghulam (slave soldiers) in shaping the empire. She co-authored Slaves of the Shah (2004) with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad.

In May 2003, at a Radcliffe Seminar at the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Babayan and other scholars discussed broadening Middle Eastern studies to include comparative literature and queer theory. The group adopted the term "Islamicate" to describe this broader field, aiming to cover Islamic history beyond theology. Babayan became an editor and contributor to the 2008 anthology Islamicate Sexualities, which explores gender and eroticism in historical Islamic societies.

Babayan then studied anthologies from the reign of Abbas the Great, showing how works gathered by ordinary Isfahan residents reflected themes of ideology, mysticism, and eroticism across social classes. This work culminated in her 2021 book The City As Anthology.

She launched the Isfahan Anthology Project at the University of Michigan, together with historian Nozhat Ahmadi from the University of Isfahan, to study majmu'a anthologies and build a digital platform for researchers to contribute and access these works.

In 2024 Babayan received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to support her next book, The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins, which examines different reading practices in early Isfahan.