The City as Anthology
Eroticism and Urbanity in Early Modern Isfahan
By Kathryn Babayan
Stanford University Press
April 2021

Household anthologies of seventeenth-century Isfahan collected everyday texts and objects, from portraits, letters, and poems to marriage contracts and talismans. With these family collections, Kathryn Babayan tells a new history of the city 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, Babayan reimagines the archive of anthologies to recover how residents shaped their communities and crafted their urban, religious, and sexual selves.

Babayan highlights eight residents—from king to widow, painter to religious scholar, poet to bureaucrat—who anthologized their city, writing their engagements with friends and family, divulging the many dimensions of the social, cultural, and religious spheres of life in Isfahan. Through them, we see the gestures, manners, and sensibilities of a shared culture that configured their relations and negotiated the lines between friendship and eroticism. These entangled acts of seeing and reading, desiring and writing converge to fashion the refined urban self through the sensual and the sexual—and give us a new and enticing view of the city of Isfahan.

About the author

Kathryn Babayan is Professor of Middle East Studies and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran (2002).

A Hundred Sweet Promises 
A true story
by Sepehr Haddad 

Inspired by a story his grandmother told him shortly before the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, A Hundred Sweet Promises is the true tale of the author’s grandfather, Nasrosoltan Minbashian—a famed music composer living in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1913.

On the eve of World War I, Nasrosoltan embarks on a journey from his homeland, Persia, to study at the renowned St. Petersburg Conservatory in pursuit of his musical legacy. During this time, through a series of events beyond his control, he becomes acquainted with the Russian royal family and falls in love with a princess. Nasrosoltan suddenly finds himself in a battle between head and heart while being carried forward on a wave of destiny toward an uncertain future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sepehr Haddad is the grandson of composer Nasrosoltan Minbashian who was the director of the Iranian Conservatory (Tehran Conservatory of Music). Sepehr is also a Universal Music Group (UMG) recording artist, with the Billboard chart-topping duo "Shahin & Sepehr."  He lives in the Washington DC metro area.