
Zara Anishanslin
Associate Professor of History and Art History
Director, American Civilization Program
University of Delaware
206 John Munroe Hall
Newark, DE 19716
Biography
Professor Anishanslin specializes in Early American and Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. Anishanslin received her PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware in 2009, where her dissertation won the prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. In 2011, it also won the University of Pennsylvania's Zuckerman National Prize in American Studies.
In 2019-20, Anishanslin was a Barra Sabbatical Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Anishanslin held additional postdoctoral fellowships as a 2014-15 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University in 2009-2010.
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 McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Winterthur Museum.
In 2018-19, Anishanslin was the Mount Vernon Fellow at the Georgian Papers Programme of King's College University of London and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. She also served as Material Culture Consultant for Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: The Exhibition in 2018-19. She will be a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in 2020-21, working on her new monograph, London Patriots: Transatlantic Politics, Material Culture, and the American Revolution.
Publications
Books:
Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, Yale University Press, 2016. Inaugural Winner, Biennial Best Book Award, The Library Company of Philadelphia. Finalist, First Book Prize, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.
Select Articles and Book Chapters:" 'This is the Skin of a Whit[e] Man:' Material Memories of Violence in Sullivan's Campaign" in Patrick Spero and Michael Zuckerman, editors, The American Revolution Reborn (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
"Producing Empire: The British Empire in Theory and in Practice," in Andrew Shankman, editor, The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent (Routledge, 2014)
Newspapers:
​"What we get wrong about Ben Franklin's 'a republic, if you can keep it': Erasing the women of the founding era makes it harder to see women as leaders today," for "Made by History" in
The Washington Post (October 29, 2019)
"The American Founders celebrated the storming of the Bastille: They understood that revolution means dismantling old power structures, violently if necessary" for "Made by History" in The Washington Post (July 14, 2020)
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