Professor Sussan Babaie appointed as a Specialist Advisor for the Research Excellence Framework sub-panel

The Courtauld is delighted to announce that Professor Sussan Babaie has been appointed as a Specialist Advisor for the Research Excellence Framework sub-panel in Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory.

Sussan is one of over 400 new members, assessors and specialist advisers who have been appointed to the REF sub-panels, following a nomination process earlier this year. Details of the assessment-phase panel membership can be found here. The new panelists include leading researchers from across a range of universities in the UK and beyond, and experts in the use and benefits of research who will play a key role in assessing the wider impact of research. The 34 expert sub-panels will carry out the detailed assessment of submissions between May 2021 and February 2022, working under the guidance of four main panels.

Sussan said “I am honoured and delighted to be joining this national effort in assessing research outputs. This REF cycle’s assessors and advisors represent a wider diversity of fields of expertise and range of topics and research methods than any in the past.”

Sussan is an art historian, curator and lecturer, who specialises in the arts of Iran and Islam. Her research interests include the early modern Safavid period with topics on architecture, urbanism and empire studies, on sexuality and social habits of ‘seeing’, and on transcultural visuality and notions of exoticism. A university-trained graphic designer, she also writes and lectures on the historiography of the global contemporary and its implications for the arts of Iran and the Middle East.

Read Professor Sussan Babaie’s faculty profile here.