Sussan Babaie: Looking at Persian Painting

Sussan Babaie is Professor of Islamic and Iranian Arts at The Courtauld. She has curated exhibitions on Persian drawings (Metropolitan Museum of Art), on Isfahan (Harvard Art Museums), and, with her students, on Islamic arts (museums at Smith College and the University of Michigan). Her research is transdisciplinary and favours transcultural over national models of art history. Her publications explore architecture and urbanity, visual representations of sexuality, and sensory experience of art. A trained graphic designer, she also writes on modern and contemporary Iranian arts with a view towards the role of history. She is the author of the award-winning Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi'ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008, PB 2018), and co-author of Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004, PB 2017), Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (2014), Shirin Neshat (2013), and Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art(2017). Sussan was President of the Historians of Islamic Art Association (2017-19), and President (2022-24) of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies.