Dr. Sussan Babaie is the Andrew W. Mellon Reader in the Arts of Iran and Islam at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. Her research and teaching focuses on the early modern period in the Persianate West and Central Asia. She also writes and lectures on the contemporary arts of Iran and the Middle East. She is the author of the award-winning Isfahan and its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008), and the co-author of Persian Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1989), Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran (2004), Shirin Neshat (2013), Persian Kingship and Architecture: Strategies of Power in Iran from the Achaemenids to the Pahlavis (2014), and Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art (2017).