Beyond Babur’s Gardens: A Symposium in Honor of Elizabeth Moynihan

Farshid Emami (PhD, Harvard University, 2017) is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specializes in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. He is the author of Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024). His scholarly interests include transregional histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, and the intersections of architecture and literature. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East.

Dr. Kathryn Gleason is Professor Emerita of landscape architecture at Cornell University. A specialist on the archaeology of designed landscapes, she seeks evidence for gardens and parks around the Roman world in Italy, Israel, and Jordan, and later sites, notably the Rajput/Mughal gardens at Nagaur, Rajasthan. She coedited The Archaeology of Garden and Field (1994), A Cultural History of Gardens in Antiquity (2013), and Gardens of the Roman Empire (2018), and she contributed to The Sourcebook on Garden Archaeology (2013). She is fellow of the American Academy in Rome, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and former senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks.

Rachel Hirsch is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her research explores the relationship between built landscapes and changing forms of empire in early modern South Asia. Her writing has been published in Muqarnas (“Building Burhanpur: The Process of Constructing a Mughal City”) and Oxford Bibliographies (“Environments and Landscapes in Islam”). Rachel holds an MS in architectural studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in South Asian studies from the University of Michigan, and a BA in art history and French studies from Wesleyan University.

Sahar Hosseini is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research explores the sociocultural dynamics of societies through the spaces they create, inhabit, and transform. Her scholarship centers on the built environment and material culture of the premodern Muslim world, particularly positioning Persianate societies at the intersection of regional and transregional flows, local practices, and the natural context of each region. Her current book project, Zayandehrud and Its City: Reading the Riverine Landscapes of Seventeenth-Century Isfahan, offers a fresh interpretation of Isfahan’s seventeenth-century urban development by shifting attention from the city center and its structures to the Zayandehrud River and its associated landscapes.

Trained as an architect at the University of Minnesota, Ali Akbar Husain earned a PhD in landscape studies at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught architecture and landscape in Pakistan, Mexico, and the Middle East; has worked as an architectural practitioner and a landscape consultant in Pakistan; and was a consultant to Nauras Trust, Bangalore, India, on the conservation of two seventeenth-century Indian gardens. In 2000, he wrote Scent in the Islamic Garden (republished 2012) and continues to present essays on Islamic Indian landscapes at conferences and symposia in the USA, the UK, India, and Pakistan.

Since September 2024, Ali Akbar has been an interdisciplinary research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This one-year award, tenable until August 2025, will be followed with a three-month period of research (September–November 2025) as a fellow at the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Ebba Koch studied and taught at the University of Vienna and held visiting professorships at Cairo, Istanbul, Oxford, and Harvard. Her scholarly interests focus on the architecture, art, iconography, and court culture of the Great Mughals of South Asia and their artistic connections to Central Asia, Iran, and Europe. Her publications include Mughal Architecture (1991, 2002, 2014), The Complete Taj Mahal (London 2006/2012), and The Planetary King: Humayun Padshah, Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne (2022), which accompanies the permanent exhibition of the Museum for Humayun’s Tomb at Delhi of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, to which she was principal advisor.

Pradip Krishen works as an ecological restoration gardener in degraded semi-arid landscapes in western India. He created Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park in Jodhpur and was project director of Kishan Bagh Sand Dunes Park in Jaipur and Abha Mahal Garden inside Nagaur Fort.

He is the author of Trees of Delhi (2006), Jungle Trees of Central India (2015), and Abha Mahal Bagh (2020).

He made feature films in the twentieth century (that’s supposed to sound very long ago) and regards that as a career he has moved away from.

He lives in New Delhi with a dog and a cat.

Mr. Ratish Nanda, conservation architect, is India CEO for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. He heads the interdisciplinary AKTC teams presently undertaking the two major urban conservation projects in India: the Nizamuddin Urban Renewal Initiative, Delhi, and the Qutb Shahi Heritage Park Conservation in Hyderabad. For AKTC, he was earlier responsible for the Baghe Babur restoration (2002–2006) in Kabul, Afghanistan, and the garden restoration of Humayun’s Tomb (1999–2003).

His major publications include Delhi, The Built Heritage: A Listing (released by the Prime Minister of India); Delhi: Red Fort to Raisina; Conservation of Historic Graveyards (Scotland); and Rethinking Conservation: Humayun’s Tomb.

He studied architecture at the TVB School of Habitat Studies, Delhi, where he graduated with the Gold Medal. Ratish then did a master’s program in conservation studies focused on the built heritage at the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York, England.

Laura E. Parodi teaches Islamic art (and English for the media) at the University of Genoa, Italy. She is the author of numerous essays on Mughal art and architecture. Her interests range from garden history and historiography to manuscript culture and court ceremonial. She previously taught classes and seminars at the University of Oxford, University College Dublin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and various Italian universities. Her publications include The Visual World of Muslim India: The Art, Culture and Society of the Deccan in the Early Modern Era (London, 2014) and the coedited Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies: An Introduction (Hamburg, 2015). Her article “Kabul, A Forgotten Mughal Capital: Gardens, City, and Court at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century” won the 2022 Professor Hasan-Uddin Khan Article Award from the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

Sugata Ray is associate professor of South and Southeast Asian art and architecture in the Departments of History of Art and South & Southeast Asian Studies and director of the South Asia Art Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is on post-1400s art and architecture in South Asia, with a focus on climate change and the environment, postcolonial geophilosophy, and post-humanist thought. Ray’s recent books include Climate Change and the Art of Devotion: Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850 and Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence (coedited).

Nicolas Roth holds a PhD in South Asian studies and currently serves as visual resources librarian for Islamic art and architecture at the Fine Arts Library of Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of horticultural practices and their reflections in literature and the visual arts, and prior to taking on his present position he worked for a local garden design firm. In his free time, he can usually be found tending to his own plot, where he strives to cultivate many of the plants he comes across in his academic work, in stubborn defiance of space constraints and climatic limitations.

Jyoti Pandey Sharma is a professor of architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India. An educator in architecture, her work critically engages with the architectural and urban history of the Indian Subcontinent’s Islamic and Colonial eras, both in terms of their past-ness and their now-ness. Her research is widely published and awarded. She has been a summer fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections, Harvard University, and a UGC associate at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, India. She has presented her research as an invited speaker at several international symposia and conferences.

James L. Wescoat Jr. is an Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of landscape architecture and geography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He conducts research on water systems in South Asia, from the garden to river basin scales. He co-led the Smithsonian Institution’s project on “Garden, City and Empire: The Historical Geography on Mughal Lahore.” His articles on Mughal water systems have focused on the Baburnama, Mehtab Bagh garden waterworks in Agra, Nagaur palace-garden complex in Rajasthan, and the Barapula Nallah watershed in Delhi, with forthcoming studies of the historical geography of the Ravi River floodplain in Lahore and the water systems of Mughal Kashmir.