The event recording is now available:
The Alireza Ahmadian Lecture in Iranian and Persianate Studies presents: Gendering the Archive: Family and Friendship in Early Modern Isfahan on November 1, 2025.
This lecture explores gender in family archives (majmu’a) from seventeenth century Isfahan. Whether as bureaucrats working for the chancellery, poets composing and copying their favorite verses, literati writing model letters, or religious scholars collecting treatises, the residents of Isfahan compiled their written lives into codices that served as professional tools and mobile devices that facilitated social interaction. Drawing on a couple of case studies, I will demonstrate how these household productions allow us to enter the domestic space and learn about family culture and modes of communicating social relations.
This talk is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Date & Time:
Saturday, November 1, 2025 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM PT
Location:
Room C300, UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street, Vancouver
Speaker
Kathryn Babayan is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2024-25) for her current project entitled, The Persian Anthology: Reading along the Margins which is a gendered history of reading practices in early modern Isfahan. Babayan is the author of two award-winning books: The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021) and Mystics, Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (Harvard University Press, 2003). She 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).
