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Zara
Anishanslin
Assistant Professor
History
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Zara Anishanslin
Assistant Professor
Office
: Building 2N
Room 208
Phone
: 718.982.3244
Fax
: 718.982.3244
zara.anishanslin@csi.cuny.edu
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Degrees :
PhD, History of American Civilization, University of Delaware
Biography / Academic Interests
:
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, “Portrait of a Woman in a Silk Dress: The Hidden Histories of Aesthetic Commodities in the British Atlantic World, 1688-1790,” won the prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. In 2011, it also won the University of Pennsylvania’s Zuckerman Prize in American Studies.
In 2009-2010, Anishanslin was the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. Additional fellowships include grants from The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, The Library Company, Harvard Atlantic Seminar, McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Winterthur Museum. She is chair and co-program chair of the Seminar in Early American History and Culture at Columbia University.
Scholarship / Publications
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Anishanslin’s first book uncovers the many histories hidden within a single luxury object: the 1746 portrait of a woman in a silk dress. This relatively unknown painting is historically remarkable for linking four people of distinct backgrounds. New England artist Robert Feke paints Philadelphian Anne Shippen Willing in a dress of fabric woven in London by Simon Julins, to a pattern by Spitalfields silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. In its exotic material, natural history aesthetic, and transatlantic creation, this object embodies the imperial trade and global networks of people, ideas, and things that shaped the eighteenth-century British Empire. The botanicals and landscapes in this portrait and silk were aesthetic choices whose commercial popularity reflected their cultural, intellectual, and political importance. Such natural history leitmotifs were crucial in a British Atlantic that relied upon the possession and dispossession of land to build empire, and linked land ownership and cultivation to virtue. Tracing the many transatlantic networks linked to these four lives spanning 1688 to 1791 shows how both women and men, in metropole and peripheries alike, used objects to build empire and wrestle with changes in commerce, politics, and culture. It is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
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