Atri Hatef Naiemi is an art and architectural historian specializing in the medieval Islamic world. Her primary research explores Iranian architecture within the context of the intercultural dynamics that developed after the Mongol Empire’s conquests in the thirteenth century. She has also conducted extensive research on the agency of Central Eurasian nomads in facilitating transcontinental exchanges during the medieval period.

Her first book Ilkhanid Capital Cities: Transcultural Interactions (Edinburgh University Press, 2025) studies the capital cities founded by the Mongol Ilkhans in Iran during the Ilkhanid period (1256–1335). Focusing on two major cities in the northwest of Iran, Ghazaniyya and Sultaniyya, this book examines how the court-sponsored urban projects in these two cities reflected the interactions between Perso-Islamic sedentary concepts and Mongolian nomadic traditions. Questioning the earlier reductive scholarly framework that positioned the Mongols as uncultured barbarians, this study stresses the active role of the Mongol elite not only as agents, but also cultural donors in the Perso-Mongol cultural zeitgeist of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Iran.

Hatef Naiemi’s current project, On the Periphery of the Ilkhanate: Provincial Architecture in Post-Conquest Iran, investigates the cities that flourished under the patronage of local dynasties in the provinces of central and southern Iran during the Ilkhanid period and in the decades following the dissolution of Ilkhanid rule in the 1330s. By examining the urban landscapes of these cities, the study aims to determine whether the large-scale architectural and urban projects undertaken in the provinces aligned with the imperial projects in the Ilkhanid capitals or if local governors developed their own formal and functional vocabulary as a means of domestic legitimation.

Her 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 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, she 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 doctoral dissertation, A Dialogue between Friends and Foes: Transcultural Interactions in Ilkhanid Capital Cities, (1256-1335 AD) was selected by the Canadian Society of Medievalists as the recipient of the 2020 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize.

Hatef Naiemi has taught courses on the art and culture on the Silk Roads, Byzantine art and architecture, the history of architecture (from Baroque to postmodern), and more thematic courses including the destruction of art.

Medieval Islamic Art, Architecture, and Archaeology, Intercultural Exchanges across Medieval Eurasia, Chinese-Persian Cultural Contacts in the Medieval Period, Vernacular Architecture in the Middle East