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” and why American revolutionaries fought to protect habeas corpus—for everyone. She’s a historical and material culture consultant for exhibitions, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s redo of its early American galleries, and (the only thing she’s done that impresses her children) Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: The Exhibition.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out her latest book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, released summer 2025 by Harvard University Press and available as an audio book. Her first book—Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) is available in paperback. And…you can find her talking about lots of stuff (literally!) on her new history podcast “Thing4Things.” Season 1: “The Stuff of Revolution,” premiered summer 2025 and is streaming everywhere you listen to podcasts.
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