Art — Karsh Institute of Democracy

The American Revolution was fought not just with muskets and bayonets but also through the creation of works of art that articulated and forged revolutionary ideals. Zara Anishanslin, associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, through portraits of three artists demonstrates the power of art in shaping democracy in her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution. This conversation is moderated by Douglas Fordham, chair of UVA’s Department of Art and author of British Art and the Seven Years' War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010) and Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019).

A limited number of lunches will be available on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 11:30 AM. Anishanslin's book will be available for purchase. Parking is not available at Bond House. If you plan to drive, there is paid parking within walking distance at the Oakhurst Inn and Central Grounds Garage. For additional handicap accessible parking spots, consult the UVA accessibility map.

The Nau Lab's “Touchstones of Democracy” series explores key events, places, thinkers, and texts that inform the history and principles of democracy. Leading up to the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence in July 2026, this event series is showcasing recent books that expand and deepen our understanding of the era of the American Revolution—and illuminate the connections of that period to the present.

The fall 2025 conversations are produced at the University of Virginia by the Karsh Institute of Democracy and the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

Speakers

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 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. For her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025), she has been 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, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to build bridges between academia and the public.

An avid public historian, Anishanslin has worked with a number of museums on exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Early American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is currently a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society and creator/co-host of the podcast “Thing4Things: The History Podcast Where Things Happen and Stuff Matters.” 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.”

Douglas Fordham is a historian of British art and is currently the chair of the Department of Art at the University of Virginia. He co-edited Art and the British Empire (2007), which helped to place empire at the center of the study of British art. His first monograph, British Art and the Seven Years' War: Allegiance and Autonomy (2010), examined the relationship of imperial politics to artistic organization in Georgian London. His second monograph, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire (2019), considered how the newly discovered medium of aquatint printmaking conditioned the representation of cultures beyond Europe. Fordham is currently working on a book about the metaphysics of British painting in the 18th century.