PhD  University of Colorado

MArch  McGill University

MArch & BArch Shahid Beheshti University

I am interested in the political dimension of architecture. My current research investigates the built environment as well as its representations and theories in relation to the practices of identity. I am particularly interested in two main venues through which the identities of the self and its “others” are constructed and reenacted: museums/exhibitions and architectural history. The nature of this research requires close interaction with other disciplines, such as art history, museum studies, cultural geography, and philosophy.

Current and upcoming projects: 

The “Global” of Architectural History – This project studies on the surveys of architectural history. As early as the mid-nineteenth century some architecture historians attempted to extend the scope of their study beyond the primarily European styles and incorporate the rest of the world. The result, however, was rarely free from strong traces of Eurocentrism. In a well-known case, Banister Fletcher divided the world architecture between “historical” and “non-historical” styles. Needless to say, these categories were mapped on Western and non-Western traditions. This project primarily focuses on the general approaches and the systems of classification within a wide range of textbooks on architectural history. It involves close reading, discourse analyses, data gathering, and visualization.

The Museum Mental Map – Many times, the explicit narrative of a museum is undermined by the implicit ideas that are conveyed through the museum layout, gallery design, object distribution, etc. This project uses tools from digital humanities to study the correlations and boundaries that museum exhibitions imply. This project involves research, archival study, fieldwork, data mapping, and visualization.