Samira Fathi

Samira Fathi is a trained architect and architectural historian interested in urban history, modernization, and urban memory, with an emphasis on the intersection of architecture, representation of power, and spatial practices. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from the University of California Santa Barbara, in 2023, and received her MA in the history of Iranian architecture and BArch in architectural design from universities in Iran. Her research and teaching are primarily centered on the history of Islamic architecture and urbanism from the 16th to the 19th century, with a geographic emphasis on Iran. She has also pursued the relationship between modernism and colonialism in her minor field of study on French colonial urbanism and modernism in the 19th century. Her first book “Residing in the Neighborhood: A Narrative of the Formation of Tehran’s Dowlat Neighborhood in the Naseri Era,” (in Persian; Matn, 2021) is an original investigation of Tehran’s quest for urban modernization in the mid-19th century and the emergence of an elite neighborhood in the city. Her doctoral dissertation examined another Iranian city, Isfahan, and its understudied urban transformations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her research offers a new narrative of Isfahan’s revival by investigating urban processes, memory, and the materiality of the built environment reflected in literary sources (i.e., tazkira or biographic dictionary) and visual representations of the city. Her forthcoming book, grounded in her doctoral research, is titled Urban Memory and Architectural Patronage in Post-Safavid Isfahan.