Sussan Babaie is Professor of the Arts of Iran and Islam at The Courtauld, University of London. A graphic designer by training (BA, Tehran University), she earned her PhD in Art History from IFA, New York University. She has curated exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Harvard and Michigan university museums, and at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.
Among her publications on the early modern period are Isfahan and its Palaces (2008, paperback 2018), Persian Kingship and Architecture (2015), and on transcultural conditions of artistic production withThe Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World (2017), and ‘The Delhi Loot and the Exotics of Empire’ (2018). More recently she has been working on the transmission of sensory experiences between the visual and the gustatory (‘Cookery and urbanity in early modern Isfahan’, 2018). She also writes on modern and contemporary arts of Iran including on Shirin Neshat (2013), Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art (2017), and for the mid-career retrospective on Slavs and Tatars.
She is currently working collaboratively on several projects focusing on the arts across trans-Asian networks: co-editor and author of Cultural History of Asian Art, six-volume series (Bloomsbury); co-curator of the Royal Academy of Art exhibition on Arts of the Great Mongol State (Spring 2027); and lead scholar on Mongol Connections, a traveling seminar supported by Connecting Art Histories grant from Getty.