Zara Anishanslin is associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, where she also is director of its Museum Studies and Public Engagement Program. 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’s been a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, and a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society. An avid public historian, she often works with museums on exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Early American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is creator/co-host of the podcast “Thing 4 Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens” (season 1, “The Stuff of Revolution” streaming now wherever you listen to podcasts)! 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.