Atri Hatef Naiemi is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. She has completed a PhD (2019) and an MA (2014) in Art History at the University of Victoria, and an MA in Architectural Restoration at the University of Tehran (2010). Prior to UBC, Atri held postdoctoral fellowships at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT (2019) and the Khalili Research Centre at the University of Oxford (2020). Her research focuses upon the Medieval Islamic architecture and urbanism, Chinese-Persian cultural contacts in the Medieval period, the history and archaeology of Central Asia in the Medieval period and traditional crafts in Iran. Her doctoral dissertation was selected by the Canadian Society of Medievalists as the recipient of the 2020 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize. Atri’s articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies and Vernacular Architecture. She has also contributed to the edited volume Earthen Architecture in Muslim Cultures: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Brill, 2018).
Hatef Naiemi offers a much-needed, detailed study of the urban interventions and foundations of the Ilkhanids in Iran within the cross-cultural and multi-religious context of the time. Her insightful analysis contextualises these cities within the broader context of the Mongol Empire, from East Asia to Anatolia, and thus is an invaluable contribution to our trans-regional understanding of this period and its architecture. -- Patricia Blessing, Stanford University This welcome study situates Mongol urbanisation in the political, religious and social history of Iran and surrounding regions. Hatef Naiemi shows how cities developed under the Mongols were sites of acculturation, serving the needs of both the foreign military elite who founded them and the indigenous population that inhabited them. -- Stefan Kamola, Austrian Academy of Sciences