Sussan Babaie joined The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2013 to take up a newly established post teaching on the arts of Iran and Islam. Her research interests include the early modern Safavid period with topics on urbanism and empire studies, on sexuality and social habits of “seeing,” and on transcultural visuality and notions of exoticism. She writes and lectures on the historiography of the global contemporary and its implications for the arts of Iran and the Middle East. Most recently, her research has been supported by grants from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She is the author of Isfahan and its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi’ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (University of Edinburgh Press, 2008).