Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi is an architectural historian of health, emotions and the body. Focusing on Britain and its colonial/postcolonial worlds (especially their entanglements with the Islamicate world), her research explores the internationalisation of hospital design ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, built-environment determinants of health, imperialism and emotion and the history of the relationship between architecture, emotions and the body.
As of January 2026, she is a British Academy International Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter, working on her project “Building for Holistic Healthcare: A Global Health History from Within, 1860s-1970s.” Focusing on five case studies in Britain and its colonial/postcolonial worlds, she investigates 1) How were categories of body, mind, and soul defined and redefined in hospital design history? 2) What insights these diverse meanings can offer into the deeply historical and situated understandings of the interaction between people and their surroundings? Building on this project, and drawing on her long-standing work on the history of emotions, she is also currently embarking on a new project tentatively titled, “Experiencing in the Anthropocene: A History of Dis-ease, Architecture and Emotions.”
She has previously held postdoctoral positions at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna (2024-25, ERC-funded project GOING VIRAL), Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2022-2024, Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship), University College Dublin (2021-2022), and the University of Edinburgh (2019-2020, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Postdoctoral Fellowship). Her first monograph, Emotion, Mission, Architecture (EUP, 2023), won the Persian Heritage Foundation (PHF) and the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS) book award in the history of art and architecture, and earned an honourable mention for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) 2025 book award. She is also the co-author (with Padma Maitland) of the forthcoming Cambridge Element, Feeling Modern European Imperial Architecture (Spring 2026), and the co-editor (with Keith Bresnahan and Cigdem Talu) of the forthcoming Bloomsbury volume, Architecture and Emotion in Historical Perspective.
