Booshra Moossavi

"Mapping Modernity: Cartography, Power, and the Representation of Urban Space in Qajar Tehran" at Iranian Studies Association 2026 Conference

Boshra Moossavi is a PhD student in Architecture at McGill University. Her research explores nineteenth-century Iran through the lenses of architectural history, urbanism, heritage, and visual culture. She is particularly interested in how maps, historical narratives, and built environments shaped understandings of place, identity, and historical consciousness. Her work combines archival research with critical approaches to the history of knowledge and has been supported by fellowships and presented at conferences in architectural history and Islamic art and architecture.

Her current research, "Mapping Modernity: Cartography, Power, and the Representation of Urban Space in Qajar Tehran," examines nineteenth-century maps of Tehran not simply as representations of the city, but as instruments through which urban space, knowledge, and authority were actively produced and negotiated. Focusing on maps created by Russian, Austrian, and Iranian actors between 1826 and 1898, the project explores how European cartographic techniques were reworked within Qajar political and institutional frameworks, revealing new ways of understanding modernity, space, and architectural knowledge in nineteenth-century Iran.