Ithaca College

Dr. Anishanslin’s talk, “Portrait of a Woman in Silk,” will be Thursday, February 28, at 6:00 p.m. in the Handwerker Gallery

Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin, a self-described “historian with a thing for things,” explores the debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.  Anishanslin examines the worlds of four people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter.  Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire.