[2] After her graduation, Babayan's research focus took an interest in mysticism and messianic beliefs in the early Persian world, with her publishing several academic articles on the subject in the mid 1990s.
This would ultimately lead to her writing of the monograph titled Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs in 2002 that addresses the political, religious, and cultural society of premodern Iran that took a broad view on how each aspect created the resulting Persian understanding of their own history.
This resulted in her collaborating on the 2004 book Slaves of the Shah with Sussan Babaie, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad.
[4] Babayan's new dedication to the use of sexuality and specifically eroticism in the era of early Iran resulted in her studying anthologies written during the reign of Abbas the Great.
As each work was compiled by a separate commoner in the urban environment of Isfahan, Babayan argued that they together represented a viewpoint that was highly tinged with eroticism and understanding of sexual and romantic love from different classes of society.