Sussan Babaie & Jacob Edmond

Sussan Babaie

Sussan Babaie received her PhD in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Since 2013, she has been Professor of the Arts of Iran and Islam at The Courtauld Institute, University of London.

She has curated exhibitions on Persian and Islamic arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at Harvard, Smith College, and Michigan university museums, and at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.

Babaie is the author of Isfahan and Its Palaces, and the co-author of Persian Kingship and Architecture, Shirin Neshat, Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art, and Geometry and Art in the Modern Middle East.

Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the Fulbright Awards (for Egypt and Syria) and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Sussan is currently working on a co-curated exhibition about arts of the Great Mongol State for The Royal Academy, London, and on a book about Persian art and food.

Jacob Edmond

Jacob Edmond is a professor of English at the University of Otago, Aotearoa, New Zealand. His work explores literary and artistic responses to global shifts in media, culture, economics, and geopolitics. He has a particular interest in generic and inter-art boundary crossing, new media, and globalization in avant-garde poetry in Russian, Chinese, and English.

His first book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature, explores how poets responded to the upheavals wrought by the end of the Cold War. His second book, Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media, examines literary and artistic works that address the proliferating copies of online media and the replication enabled by globalization. His current book project draws on literary and artistic responses to the news media to ask why our instant access to news from around the world brings not global understanding but paralysing confusion.

By closely engaging with texts in Chinese, Russian and English, all his work addresses the global trends and linguistic and cultural differences that shape our contemporary world.