Zara Anishanslin is a scholar who specializes in doing history through material culture—the “historian with a thing for things.”
She’s a professor who’s equally passionate about spreading historical knowledge inside the classroom and being a public historian. You can find her talking history on podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World and TV shows like the Travel Channel’s Mysteries at the Museum. She writes about how the past is relevant to the present for the “Made by History” series at The Washington Post—like the real history of the famous phrase, “a republic, if you can keep it.” She’s often a historical and material culture consultant for exhibitions, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent redo of its early American galleries, and (most impressive to her children) Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: The Exhibition.
From 2023-25, she’s a Postdoctoral Fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, working on her new book, Under the King’s Nose: Ex-Pat Patriots in the American Revolution (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, forthcoming in 2025). If you haven’t seen it yet, check out her first book—Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016), available in paperback. And…soon you can find her talking about lots of stuff (literally!) on her new history podcast “Thing4Things.” To meet the rest of the team, hear more about Season 1: “The Stuff of Revolution,” and get notified when it premieres, visit wwww.thing4thingspodcast.com!
Image: From shoot for author’s photo for Portrait of a Woman in Silk, outside the New-York Historical Society. Photo by C. Moncrief.
Banner image: adapted from Anna Maria Garthwaite, watercolor on paper, damask silk design for Simon Julins, 1743, T. 391–197, p. 55. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.