AKPIA Lecture Series — Sahar Hosseini "Entangled with the River: The Making of Safavid Isfahan from Watershed to Body"

Entangled with the River: The making of Safavid Isfahan from Watershed to Body

Abstract: The usual story of seventeenth-century Isfahan is a story of land: a capital remade by Shah Abbas I (r.1588-1629) and his Safavid successors through squares, gardens, promenades, and monumental structures, making the city a rival to the great cities of the early modern world. This talk proposes a shift of lens, from land to water, and asks what that shift offers to the study of the familiar. If the city is read outward from its famed river, the Zāyandehrud, what new questions arise, which new actors enter the story, which overlooked spaces come into view, and what fresh interpretations of well-known structures emerge? 

Moving between scales, from the watershed to a single structure, this talk argues that the Zāyandehrud was an active agent in shaping the physical and social fabric of seventeenth-century Isfahan. The river’s seasonal flow and other qualities set the terms; Safavid builders harnessed its potential and contended with its limits and threats. These engagements left traces in the built environment: from ambitious infrastructural projects to urban spaces and gardens, down to the physical structure of its bridges. Read together, they reveal a city shaped in continuous dialogue with its river. 

Sahar Hosseini

Sahar Hosseini is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. A landscape and architectural historian of the Islamic world, she focuses on early modern Persianate societies. Her research puts architectural history into conversation with the environmental humanities and eco-critical thought, examining local ecologies and practices and the ways they intersected with transregional flows in the making of place. She has published on the architecture and landscapes of the Safavid period, on continuities between Safavid and Mughal building practices, and on methodologies for writing landscape and architectural history.  Her forthcoming book, Zāyandehrud and Its City: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century Isfahan (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2028), traces the relationship between Isfahan’s great river and the city’s transformation after it became the Safavid imperial capital.