Keelan Overton
The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin (EYV) is simultaneously the burial place of Yahya ebn-e Ali (d. 869-70), a destination for ziyarat (pious visitation), a neighborhood community center and cemetery, an architectural monument of Iran’s Ilkhanid period (1256–1353), a cultural heritage site and tourist destination, and the source of luster tiles in fifty museums worldwide.
This online exhibition, which is also a sizeable digital publication, offers an alternative museological space for exploring the shrine’s many layers, resonances, and stories over the last seven hundred years. The website is mirrored in Persian and English and includes about seventy scholarly contributions across six galleries and a checklist. At present, about 20% of the multilingual (English, Persian, and French) contents are available in translation. At the time of its launch on January 15, 2025, the website was about 90% complete, and features marked “Coming Soon” are in production.
This digital project is the first scientific outcome of the EYV Project, an independent research initiative dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of the shrine, without pursuing political, commercial, or institutional interests. Directed by Dr. Keelan Overton since 2021 and involving the EYV research and website teams and about 50 participants worldwide, the core values of the EYV Project are independence, collaboration, and accessibility.
The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine is produced by 33 Arches, hosted by Khamseen: Islamic Art History Online, and partially supported by academic grants, including the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan.
Keelan Overton (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 2011) is an independent scholar and historian of art and architecture specializing in the Perso-Islamic world from Iran to India. Her publications explore the purveying of Iran’s cultural heritage, life histories of manuscripts and buildings, and cultural relations between Iran and the Deccan. The last culminated in her edited volume Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700 (2020). Overton is the Director and Curator of The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: An Online Exhibition of an Iranian Shrine, an independent production of her academic studio 33 Arches and hosted by Khamseen. Her publications on the Emamzadeh Yahya include “Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: The Emamzadeh Yahya through a Nineteenth-Century Lens” (2024), “Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin” (2022) and, with Kimia Maleki, “The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018–20” (2020).
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