Historian with a Thing for Things
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’s written about how the past is relevant to the present for Time and The Washington Post—like the real history of the famous phrase, “a republic, if you can keep it.” She’s 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.
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.” Visit wwww.thing4thingspodcast.com to meet the rest of the team, hear more about Season 1: “The Stuff of Revolution,” and get notified when it premieres (June 12, 2025!)
From 2023-25, she’s a Postdoctoral Fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, and excited to launch her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025).