Lecture—The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution

About Zara Anishanslin

[How to pronounce my name: Zah-rah Ann-iss-hans-lin]

Zara Anishanslin is professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, where she also is director of its Museum Studies and Public Engagement Program. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture and public history. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Her award-winning first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. Her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025) has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal and was on the 2026 Cundill History Prize Longlist. While researching The Painter’s Fire, she was a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, a fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society, a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, and a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society. An avid public historian, her work has appeared in Time, Mount Vernon Magazine, Colonial Williamsburg’s Trend and Tradition Magazine, and The Washington Post. She spent part of her childhood in St. Louis, is a proud graduate of MICDS (she attended when it was still the Mary Institute), and a longtime fan of the Saint Louis Art Museum. She often works with museums on exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Early American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is creator/cohost of the podcast Thing 4 Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens (season 1, “The Stuff of Revolution” streaming now). But according to her children, the only cool thing on her CV is that she served as material culture consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, Hamilton: The Exhibition.