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, received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, the Book Award of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and an honorable mention from the Persian Heritage Foundation-Association for the Study of Persianate Societies Book Award. Widely reviewed by historians and architectural historians, the book 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 chapters take the reader through Isfahan’s markets, promenades, and coffeehouses, bringing to life the social landscapes that animated urban dwellers’ lives and informed their perceptions of themselves and the world.
Farshid Emami’s articles have appeared in the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Muqarnas, and several edited volumes and exhibition catalogs. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has 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 that explore the materiality and sensorium of Safavid palaces and the global architectural history of coffeehouses.
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 offers an undergraduate course on the global history of coffeehouses. 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).
Expanding Contexts: Shifting Horizons in Islamic Art and Architecture, Selected Essays from 8th Biennial Symposium of Historians of Islamic Art Association, Houston (De Gruyter Brill, forthcoming 2027) (co-edited with Aimée Froom and Julie Timte).
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
“The Architects Who Made Safavid Isfahan: Cross-Disciplinary Connections and the Process of Architectural Design in Early Modern Iran,” Muqarnas 43 (forthcoming 2026): 1–41.
“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.
“Coffeehouses, Urban Spaces, and the Formation of a Public Sphere in Safavid Isfahan,” Muqarnas 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.
Selected Chapters in Edited Volumes and Exhibition Catalogs
“Safavid Isfahan, Iran: Urbanism, Monuments, and Urban Life,” in Architecture, Monuments and Urbanism: Part II: Cities on the Overland Silk Roads, ed. Elena Paskaleva and Mike Turner (UNESCO, 2025), 331–51.
“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.
“Ottoman and Safavid Coffee Cultures,” in Dining with the Sultan: The Fine Art of Feasting, ed. Linda Komaroff (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2023), 114–16.
“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.
“Passages and Malls in Translation: Commercial Architecture in Pahlavi Iran,” in Architectural Dynamics in Pre-Revolutionary Iran: Dialogic Encounter between Tradition and Modernity, ed. Mohammad Gharipour (Intellect, 2019), 81–109.
“Notions of Class and Culture in Housing Projects in Tehran, 1945-1960,” in Social Housing in the Middle East: Architecture, Urban Development, and Transnational Modernity, eds. Kivanc Kilinc and Mohammad Gharipour (Indiana University Press, 2019), 267–90 (with Jaleh Jalili).
“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.
Selected Reviews of Scholarly Books
Peyvand Firouzeh, Intimacies of Global Sufism: Neʿmatullahi Shrines and Material Culture Between Iran and India (Indiana University Press, 2025), Architectural History (2026). DOI: 10.5334/arh.38.
Sinem Arcak Casale, Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639 (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), The Art Bulletin 108, no. 4 (2024): 124–26.
Ali Mozaffari and Nigel Westbrook, Development, Architecture and the Formation of Heritage in late twentieth-century Iran: A Vital Past (Manchester University Press, 2020), Iranian Studies 56, no. 2 (2023): 423–25.
Moya Carey, Persian Art: Collecting the Arts of Iran for the V&A (London: V&A Publishing, 2017), caa.reviews (June 21, 2019).