Entangled with the River: The making of Safavid Isfahan from Watershed to Body (HAA Colloquium)

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 Zayandehrud, what new questions arise, which new actors enter the story, which overlooked spaces come into view, and what fresh interpretations of well-known buildings emerge? Moving between scales, from the watershed to the body of a single structure, the talk argues that the Zayandehrud was never a neutral backdrop to the city’s development. Its properties were carefully considered, its potentials were put to work, and its limits and threats were managed. Each of these engagements left traces in Isfahan’s built environment: from gardens and urban spaces, to ambitious infrastructural projects, to the physical structure of its bridges. Read together, they reveal a city shaped in continuous dialogue with its river. About the Speaker: Sahar Hosseini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art & Architecture. Read her faculty profile. About the Image: Aerial view of Isfahan, with the Zayandehrud (highlighted) flowing through the Safavid-era southwards development of the city. Erich Scmidt, Aerial Survey of Iran Field Negatives, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago, AE-053.