Farshid Emami specializes in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. His first monograph, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (2024), reconstructs the spaces and senses of seventeenth-century Isfahan, the Safavid capital, and narrates its story as a social living environment. Drawing on literary sources, the book takes the reader on journeys through Isfahan’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated the lives of urban dwellers and shaped their perceptions of themselves and the world. Isfahan won the 2025 Book Award from the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and received an honorable mention from the Persian Heritage Foundation-Association for the Study of Persianate Societies 2025 Book Award.
Farshid Emami’s articles have appeared in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Muqarnas as well as several edited volumes. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has also written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East. Currently, he is working on two book projects exploring the materiality and sensorium of Safavid palaces and the intersections of architecture and literature in pre-modern Islamic lands.
Trained as an architect and urban designer, Emami earned a master’s degree in Architecture Studies from MIT in 2011. He completed his Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University in 2017. Before joining Rice in 2020, he taught at Oberlin College for 2.5 years and was an Andrew M. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
At Rice, he teaches an introductory course on Islamic art and architecture as well as global surveys of art and architectural history. He also teaches an undergraduate course on the global history of coffeehouses and teahouses. Recent seminars have addressed topics such as Persianate Arts of the Book; Architecture and Literature in Islamic Cultures; and Architecture, Trade, and Power in Early Modern Islamic Empires. His courses involve frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Books
Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024).
Selected Articles and Chapters
“The Architects Who Made Safavid Isfahan: Mathematical Sciences, Visual Arts, and the Process of Architectural Design in Early Modern Iran,” Muqarnas 43 (forthcoming 2026).
“Sensing Time and Sound in Safavid Isfahan: The Clocks of the Maydan-i Naqsh-i Jahan,” in Regime Change: New Horizons in Islamic Art and Visual Culture, ed. Christiane Gruber and Bihter Esener (Gingko, 2024), 110–27.
“Religious Architecture of Safavid Iran,” in The Religious Architecture of Islam, Vol. 1, Asia and Australia, eds. Hasan-Uddin Khan and Kathryn Blair Moore (Brepols, 2021), 256–73.
“All the City’s Courtesans: A Now-lost Safavid Pavilion and its Figural Tile Panels,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 54 (2019): 62–86.
“Royal Assemblies and Imperial Libraries: Polygonal Pavilions and their Functions in Mughal and Safavid Architecture,” South Asian Studies 35, no. 1 (2019): 63–81.
“Discursive Images and Urban Itineraries: Literary Form and City Experience in Early Modern Iran,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 3 (2018): 154–186.
“The Lithographic Image and its Audiences,” in Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran, ed. David J. Roxburgh and Mary McWilliams (Harvard Art Museums, 2017), 55–79.
“Coffeehouses, Urban Spaces, and the Formation of a Public Sphere in Safavid Isfahan,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World 33 (2016): 177–220.
“Urbanism of Grandiosity: Planning a New Urban Centre for Tehran (1973–1976),” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 3, no. 1 (2014): 69–102.