Dr Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi

I am an architectural historian of health, emotions and the body with a focus on Britain and the British Empire in the Islamicate world. My research covers interdisciplinary areas of the history of emotions and the senses, medical humanities, the history of the body and imperial and global history. More specifically, I operate between, across and at the edges of these interdisciplinary areas to destabilise dominant forms of thinking about how people relate to their surroundings. I explore the categories, methods and concepts we use to conceptualise and understand this relationship, and the implications it has for our understanding of power and of the determinants of health (beyond absence of disease). I have pursued these research interests across various projects including my first monograph, Emotion, Mission, Architecture (EUP, 2023), which 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. It also received an honourable mention for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) 2025 Book Award.

Emotion, Mission, Architecture argues that the motto ‘healing bodies, saving souls’, often associated with missionary medicine, might be rendered ‘affecting bodies, saving souls’. The book contemplates the missionary side of this motto through the locus of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) medical mission work in Persia and north-western British India. In doing so, it makes a case for the history of emotions as a way of writing architectural histories of health and of British Imperialism. I have recently expanded on strands emerging from this book in a forthcoming Cambridge Element (March 2026), Feeling Modern European Imperial Architecture, co-authored with Padma Maitland. The Element invites architectural historians of modern European imperialism to draw on the insights and promises of the history of emotions to better understand imperial missions and their biocultural imprint.

As of January 2026, I am a British Academy International Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the University of Exeter, working on my project 'Building for Holistic Healthcare: A Global Health History from Within, 1860s-1970s'. Architects and health policy experts alike consider nurturing the body, mind and soul through the built environment with great attention in the context of efforts to promote holistic healthcare design. But little is said about different meanings of the categories of body, mind and soul across time and place. The literature that has investigated historical examples of hospitals with respect to holistic design has also disregarded the potentials of these diverse meanings. ‘Building for Holistic Healthcare’ is the first major study to address this lacuna to refine some of our basic assumptions about built environment determinants of health and to provide new insights for holistic healthcare design. Focusing on five case studies in Britain and its colonial/postcolonial worlds, I investigate 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? 

I am also currently co-editing (with Keith Bresnahan and Cigdem Talu) a volume on Architecture and Emotion in Historical Perspective for Bloomsbury's History of Emotions series. Additionally, Cigdem and I are co-orgainising an online reading group on ‘Sensory Anthropocene and Architecture’, which brings our previous work into dialogue with environmental humanities. We hope to develop this reading group to a collaborative Working Group on 'Senses, Architecture & the Anthropocene'. Related to this initiative, I am embarking on a new project tentatively titled, 'Perception as Praxis: An Alternative History of the Anthropocene'.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (RHS) and was an Associate Fellow of the Johanna Quandt Young Academy at Goethe (JQYA) in 2023-24.