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 thoughts 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, 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.
She is currently working on her next book project which explores Safavid architecture as dynamic formation rooted in local building practices yet reshaped through regional and transregional mobilities of the early modern world. It considers how circulating materials, objects, technologies, and ideas were adopted, adapted, and reworked through their encounter with specific environmental conditions, craft practices, and cultural sensitivities. Her work on the Persianate world, also examines Mughal–Safavid continuities and exchanges, examining how shared cultural practices, and circulation of knowledge and ideas across regions found expression in material and architectural forms.
Hosseini’s teaching on the art and architecture of the Islamic World treats forms and buildings as windows into different moments and places across the Islamic world, revealing a dynamic world in constant conversation with its surrounding rather than a monolithic culture. Her curriculum also includes courses on methodological approaches to the built environment; on environmental systems and ecocritical approaches to architectural history; as well as community-engaged practicums that work with marginalized neighborhood in Pittsburgh, extending her earlier community-engaged work at Rutgers-Newark.
- PhD – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- MLA – University of Tehran
- B.Arch. – University of Tehran
Education & Training
- ACLS Research Support, 2025
- Getty-ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2022-23
- Barakat Major Award, 2022-23 (declined)
- Andrew Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Library and Archives, 2018-19
- Andrew Mellon Fellowship in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Humanities Institute - New York Botanical Garden, 2017
“Beyond Vision: Sensory Experience in Shah Tahmasb’s Sixteenth-century Garden” in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 44 (4), 286-301. (co-authored with Mohammad Gharipour and Manu Sobti – Published 2024)
“The Invisible Lake of Sa’adat-Abad and the Safavid Architecture of Affect” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 82, Issue 4, (Dec 2023): 395-419. (Published 2023)
“Building Isfahan for Tomorrow: The United States’ Point Four Program and Discourse on Urban Planning in Iran” in Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: Dialogue and Encounter Between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Chicago: Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2019): 113-142. (Published 2019)
“Safavid and Mughal Urban Bridges: Visual and Embodied Experience of Nature,” in South Asian Studies, 35, no.1 (August 2019): 107-128. (Published 2019)
Re-examining Persian Civitas: Networked Urbanities and Suburban Hinterlands in Erich Schmidt’s Flights, in The Historiography of Persian Architecture, ed. Mohammad Gharipour, (London, New York: Routledge, 2015): 14-40 (Co-authored with Manu Sobti – published 2016)
