Zara Anishanslin

Biography

Professor Anishanslin specializes in Early American and Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware’s History of American Civilization program in 2009 and won the Sypherd Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature and a BA in History with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Additional fellowships include grants from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, The Library Company, Harvard Atlantic Seminar, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Winterthur Museum. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians.

Anishanslin is currently a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, where she completed work on her forthcoming book, The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025). This project also garnered her support as a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow in partnership with the Museum of the American Revolution. As a Scholars & Society Fellow, Anishanslin furthered innovations in doctoral training and sought to build bridge between academia and the public humanities, a cause she is passionate about and strives to incorporate into her own career, as for example when she served as Material Culture Consultant for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s history exhibit, “Hamilton! The Exhibition.” In addition to teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses in history, art history, and material culture, she is an active public historian with professional and pedagogical experience in museum studies and historic preservation. She is the creator and co-host of the history podcast “Thing4Things” which is in production and premieres soon.