Abstract

Early modern Isfahan was a cosmopolitan city that offered a staggering array of pleasures to its visitors and inhabitants. Based on my recently published book, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024), this talk examines the city’s topography of leisure through the lens of the “Guide for Strolling in Isfahan,” a literary composition penned around 1660, which offers instructions for a one-day solitary excursion in the Safavid capital. Beginning at dawn, the recommended itinerary includes stops at several coffeehouses, a hookah stall, a royal palace, and the city’s new congregational mosque, among other places; the whirlwind urban journey culminates in a nocturnal tryst with a courtesan in the pleasure district of Isfahan. Tracing the itinerary of the tour on the map of the city, this talk analyzes the “Guide for Strolling in Isfahan” as a literary artifact and spatial representation, revealing how seventeenth-century Isfahan—with its markets, coffeehouses, and urban spaces—gave rise to novel modes of experiencing and imagining the city. 

Bio

Farshid Emami (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2017) is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and particularly Safavid Iran. His scholarly interests include transregional histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, intersections of architecture and literature, and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the Persianate lands and beyond. He is the author of Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024). 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.