Strolling Isfahan offers a conceptual ‘walk’ in the city through interdisciplinary investigations into the arts, material culture, and built environment of seventeenth-century city in central Iran. We focus on the artists, architects, patrons, monarchs and merchants who made Isfahan one of the most vital cities in early modern Eurasia, and look at the city as a ‘happening’, a historical site activated by the sensory experiences of art, architecture and urban spaces. Our sources of study and research are diverse in nature ranging from historical and scientific treatises, to guild documents and manuals of craft, poetry and epigraphy, decrees and memoirs, treatises on painting, calligraphy and the culinary arts, as well as artist/poet biographies. Our case studies on things—portable objects and built environment, quotidian or luxury, public or royal, guide us through interdisciplinary investigations.
We are as interested in this course to learn about the language of style and of technologies as about complex intersections of the making and the writing, the practices that elucidate dominant theories of ‘art’ and of ‘taste’, and of the meaning of being an Isfahani cosmopole, a self-conscious urbanity that imbues all the arts and practices of life in Isfahan. The course is furthermore integrated into a larger interest in early modern urbanity with shared teaching and field trips with other MA Special Options where we come together to consider such themes as mobility, knowledge formation, economies of production and consumption, issues of temporality and periodisation.
This MA Special Option ordinarily takes field trips to major collections in London and nearby but also to farther destinations. Students may undertake two trips, where possible, which may be fully subsidised or mostly subsidised depending on the chosen locations (options range from Copenhagen and Dublin, to Istanbul and Doha). We visit public museums and libraries, auction house storage spaces, and private collections, where possible.
Knowledge of Persian is not required but commitment to devote substantial effort to learning Persian is crucial (language training courses to be arranged).
Please note: site visits in the UK and further afield are subject to Covid-19 guidelines.
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Course Leader: Professor Sussan Babaie
In the event that a course leader is on sabbatical, takes up a fellowship, or otherwise is not able to the teach the course, they will be replaced by another experienced course leader either for the autumn term, or in some cases, the academic year.