Dr. Safa Mahmoudian, BA M.Sc.

Safa Mahmoudian is an art and architectural historian, with a focus on Western Asia from the early Islamic to early modern periods. She is currently the principal investigator of the “Travelling Gardens” project (2024–2027), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Before joining the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Dr. Mahmoudian held academic positions at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Oxford, the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Department of Art History of the University of Vienna.
Her forthcoming book “Palace Gardens in Lower Mesopotamia, 8th–11th Centuries” (Edinburgh University Press, October 2024) ‎‏incorporates a ‎wide range of ‎‎previously un- or ‎underutilised primary‎ source materials to create a ‎‎comprehensive picture of these ‎gardens ‎‎in their historical, architectural and ‎environmental contexts, and to examine various ‎factors that ‎‎influenced their design and ‎placement. Her first monograph (Tehran, 2017) explores the riverine landscape of a main water ‎‎‎canal‎ – ‎Fadan Mādī‎ – in seventeenth-century Isfahan from various angles. It demonstrates the important role that the water system of Isfahan played as ‎a backbone in the morphology, architecture, and daily life of this city.
Trained as an architect with extensive experience in working with Arabic and Persian textual sources, Dr. Mahmoudian received her BA and MA from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran, and her DPhil (doctorate) ‎‎from the Faculty of‎ Historical and Cultural Studies‎ of ‎the ‎‎University of Vienna. Her doctoral thesis received the 2022 Grete Mostny Prize.