Hosted by the Humanities Center and faculty fellow, Sahar Hosseini. Respondents include YuHao Chen (Music) & D. Fairchild Ruggles (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer.

During the past decade, the iconic images of the increasingly dry riverbed of the Zayanderud (literally meaning life-giving river) have turned into a worrisome and ironic reminder of how climatic change, water scarcity, and poor water management would irreversibly alter the historical imageability of Isfahan (Iran). Historically, the Zayanderud has remained a central component of Isfahan’s collective memory, inspiring nostalgic recollections of a bygone glorious past when Isfahan was hailed as one of the major urban centers of early-modern Eurasia.   In fact, Isfahan’s ascent as the new capital of the Safavid Empire (1501-1737) in 1598 catalyzed a range of vibrant political, cultural, and urban transformations that extended the city towards and beyond the river, turned the river into an integral contributor to the city's economic, social, political, and religious life and made the new Isfahan a riverine city, and Zayanderud an urban river. Reconsidering modern scholarship’s long-standing intellectual and conceptual divide between city and nature, the project demonstrates the entanglement of the natural and the cultural in the seventeenth-century urban development of Isfahan. Foregrounding "natural systems," it reveals how the new city and its life were closely intertwined with the productive, affective, and disruptive powers of the river. In this manner, the project claims an active voice for the Zayanderud in the narratives we compose for Isfahan’s urban history.