About the Author

Zara Anishanslin is assistant professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware.

Reviews

"Anishanslin is a good sleuth. . . . Her scholarly commitment and her enthusiasm are disarming."—Victoria Glendinning, Literary Review

Finalist for the 2016 First Book Award given by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians

"This dazzling book discovers within one small canvas a brilliant array of lives, trades, circuits, and empires. Written with verve and insight, Anishanslin’s Portrait of a Woman in Silk paints a global early America in vivid color. It will astonish."—Jane Kamensky, author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley

"Anishanslin’s capacity to let objects speak about things beyond status and refinement is remarkable. This is hard to do, and she does it brilliantly, and beautifully."—Lauren Winner, Duke University

"Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Behind this deceptively modest (but alluring) title lies a book of stunning insight and creative achievement. No other work I can think of brings together such a range of viewpoints: the mental with the material, the personal with the global, a raft of technical details with extraordinary conceptual depth. From a single painting Anishanslin opens a vast panorama, reaching to the farthest corners of the eighteenth-century world."—John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

"Extremely intriguing. No one has written such a book, nor made such an argument."—David Hancock, The University of Michigan