Finding Black Founders in Iconic Early American Portraits

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. 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 first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians. For her current project, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, forthcoming July 2025) she’s been a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to innovate doctoral training and build bridges between academia and the public. She is currently a Fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society and creator/co-host of the forthcoming podcast “Thing4Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens.” But according to her children, the only really cool thing on her CV is that she’s been on the Travel Channels “Mysteries at the Museum” show and served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”