Zara Anishanslin is an Assistant Professor of History at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York. She received her PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware in 2009. From 2009-2010 she was the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book is a history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic told through the single portrait of a colonial woman in a silk dress. It is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Anishanslin also serves as Co-Chair of the Seminar in Early American History and Culture at Columbia University.
Anishanslin’s project is a history of the American Revolution narrated through visual and material culture. This book uses images and objects to bring together histories often kept separate, like military and women’s history. In part, the book deliberately crosses such boundaries to focus on the production of goods and ideas in public and private spaces (in part to move beyond previous scholarly emphasis on consumption). To get past the binaries that often still characterize the historiography on the Revolution, it uses objects and images to narrate how ideology, politics, and war—and their material practices—were ambivalent and fluid in the revolutionary era.
