Mellon Fellowships in Urban Landscape Studies

Sahar Hosseini received the 2019 Mellon Fellowships in Urban Landscapes Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Hosseini is an alumni of the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures area within the Architecture doctoral program. She received a PhD in Architecture in 2018.

Hosseini will use her time at Dumbarton Oaks to work on adopting her doctoral dissertation manuscript for a book project, which examines the unprecedented urban development of seventeenth-century Isfahan through the lens of its nearby Zayandehrud River and the multi-faceted role of the river as a geographic feature, a natural resource, and a social construct.

Dumbarton Oaks, affiliated with the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is one of the few institutions in the world with a program devoted to garden and landscape studies that is targeted at both humanities scholars and landscape practitioners. The Mellon Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks is intended to expand significantly the opportunities offered by the institution to both of these groups, building constructive dialogue between them about the history and future of urban landscapes, and encouraging them to bridge the gap between their professional modes of thinking.