From Marrakesh to Isfahan: A discussion with Dr. Finbarr Barry Flood about the new books by Abbey Stockstill and Farshid Emami

Please join us for the joint book event From Marrakesh to Isfahan, a discussion between Abbey Stockstill and Farshid Emami regarding their recent publications in the “Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies” series with Penn State Press, moderated by Dr. Finbarr Barry Flood. Spanning the medieval to the early modern, and reaching across the breadth of the Islamic world, Stockstill and Emami take innovative approaches to studying urban space, drawing on phenomenological experiences and novel readings of historical source material. In doing so, they question traditional paradigms of urbanism in the Islamic lands, and explore alternative models for understanding metropolitan development. Stockstill’s book, Marrakesh and the Mountains: Landscape, Urban Planning, and Identity in the Medieval Maghrib, explores the city’s emergence as a North African capital under the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties, and the powerfully resonant role the surrounding landscape played in expressing authority and belonging on an urban scale. Emami’s Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran develops the nature of Safavid cosmopolitanism as the product of a variety of individual and communal urban experiences, and expressed through the sensorial as much as the architectural. Join us on Friday, September 13, at 12 PM EST/11 PM CT/5 PM GMT for a discussion of these new contributions to architecture and urbanism in the Islamic world.