Les Causeries du ROM

From Courtyards to Coffee Houses: The Painted Worlds of Isfahan

Sussan Babaie joined The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2013 to take up a newly established post teaching on the arts of Asia which was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Born in Iran, Sussan attended the University of Tehran’s Faculty of Fine Arts (Graphic Design) until the revolution of 1979 when she moved to the USA to study for a Master’s degree in Italian Renaissance and American Arts (American University, Washington, DC). She followed this with a PhD at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she focused on the arts of Islam. She has many years of experience teaching at Smith College and the University of Michigan in the US, and as the Allianz Visiting Professor at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich.

Farshid Emami (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2017) is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. He is the author of Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024). His scholarly interests include transregional histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, and the intersections of architecture and literature. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East. 

Lisa Golombek is Curator Emeritus (Islamic Art) at ROM and Professor Emerita, University of Toronto (retired 2005). Author and co-author of five books and over 70 articles covering a wide range of topics in the field of Islamic arts, including architecture (The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan with D. Wilber, 1988), ceramics, epigraphy, textiles, and Persian gardens, her main focus has been on the cultures of greater Iran, including Afghanistan and Central Asia. Her period of specialty was the fifteenth century, but since taking on the study of Safavid pottery, her interests have shifted to the pre-modern period in Iran (c. 1600–1900). The Isfahan Urban History Project, carried out in 1974–76, traced the historical growth of the city and laid the foundations for her later research on Safavid palaces. The hunt for tiles across the globe has led to investigation into the dispersal of the Iranian cultural heritage by dealers catering to demand from European markets in the late nineteenth century. This material will form a chapter in the forthcoming book authored by Golombek and Robert B. Mason, Princes, Dervishes and Dragons: The Tile Arcade from Safavid Isfahan (c. 1685–95) (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).