- Category
- Lectures
Lecture—The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution
The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies by soldiers with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. Join Zara Anishanslin, associate professor of history and art history and director of the Museum Studies and Public Engagement Program at the University of Delaware, to discover the inspiring stories and intertwined lives of three of these largely forgotten patriot artists: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. They defied the British monarchy, armed with paint, canvas, wax, and espionage while risking their lives and reputations to support the cause of liberty.
Anishanslin’s book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, will be on sale in the Museum Shop, and she will be available to sign books immediately following the program.
This program is supported by the Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin American Art Lecture Endowment.
About Zara Anishanslin
Zara Anishanslin specializes in early American and Atlantic world history, with a focus on 18th-century material culture. She received her doctorate from the University of Delaware’s History of American Civilization program in 2009 and won the Sypherd Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. She earned bachelor’s degrees in comparative literature and in history with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins.
Anishanslin is currently a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, where she completed work on her book The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution. This project also garnered her support as a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow in partnership with the Museum of the American Revolution.
Zara_Anishanslin (c) Catherine Hamilton Bernhardt
Ticket information
Tickets can be reserved in person or through MetroTix. All tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge; the service charge is waived for tickets reserved at the Museum.
