Shii News – BIPS: ‘The City of Isfahan as Actor’ – K Babayan (Webinar, 27.4.22, 5pm UK Time)

This talk explores Isfahan through the lens of seventeenth century household anthologies (majmu’a). Thousands of manuscripts produced in Isfahan assembled urban objects ranging from portraits and letters from friends, to poems depicting the central square, to marriage contracts and talismans. Authors collected, curated, and bound together material generated by Isfahan’s culture of adab to learn how to act and relate to other residents of a diverse and ever-growing capital city. With these family collections, Professor Babayan tells a new history of Isfahan at the transformative moment it became a cosmopolitan center of imperial rule. Bringing into view people’s lives from a city with no extant state or civic archives, Kathryn Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover the dialogic relationship between the city and its residents.

Posted in: Field-specific (academic), Iran