Kamyar Salavati

I wish to be an intellectual flâneur, someone who wanders between disciplines and media to discover new ways of experiencing the world. I trained in architecture while also learning Iranian classical music. For my master’s degree at the University of Tehran, I switched to architectural theory, while writing about music in magazines and academic journals. I co-founded Dalan in 2019, a widely circulated cultural and creative magazine which offered multidisciplinary readings of one street per issue, but I was also drawn to Medical Humanities when I started my PhD at the University of Exeter, as my research explores how modern architecture was defined and justified through modern health, and how it affected the socio-cultural ideas and norms of the time.

In addition to pursuing my PhD and teaching as a PTA at the University of Exeter (in the Department of Geography and the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), I work with the prestigious Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) as an assistant editor. My academic publications have appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (University of Cambridge), Planning Perspectives (Taylor and Francis), The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema (Bloomsbury), Music, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Twentieth Century (Academia Press), International Journal of Islamic Architecture (Intellect), Le Regards (Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth), Mahoor Ethnomusicology Quarterly, Journal of Fine Arts: Architecture and Urbanism (University of Tehran), and The Journal of Iranian Architectural Studies.

Alongside my work on medical humanities and architecture, I write about sound studies, music, and cinema in academic journals and write reviews for music magazines such as The Songlines, The Quietus, and The Wire. My teaching includes Southern Urbanisms (2024–2025) and An Introduction to Persian Culture (2023–2026) as a postgraduate teaching assisstant, Contemporary Architecture (2020-2021) in University of Tehran as a teaching assisstant, Architectural Theories as guest lecturer at Garmsar University (2020-2021), and Islamic Architecture (2017-2019) at the University of Tehran. I have also published creative texts, including a short story in The City at Night (2022), published by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. I also served on the editorial team of architecture and music magazines such as Koubeh (co-founder), Hamshahri Meämari,  and Noise Reviews.