Sahar Hosseini

Sahar Hosseini is an architectural and landscape historian of the Islamic world, specializing in the early modern period and Safavid Persia (1501-1736). Her research puts architectural history into conversation with the environmental humanities and ecocritical thought and explores the ways that early modern flows intersected with local ecologies and practices in the making of place.

Her first book, Zayandehrud and Its City: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century Isfahan (Forthcoming from Dumbarton Oaks | Harvard University Press), (illustration printing and copyediting funded by The Barakat Trust) explores the intricate relationship between Isfahan’s prominent river and the city’s transformative urban development during the seventeenth century, after Isfahan was designated the Safavid imperial capital. The book demonstrates how the river’s ecological systems, temporal rhythm, and physical properties informed the vision of the new city. In turn, infrastructural and architectural projects in the capital folded the river into the city’s physical and social fabric, creating new sensory, spatial, and affective relationships with the river.