Zara Anishanslin Bernhardt

In 1746, Robert Feke painted Philadelphian Anne Shippen Willing wearing a Spitalfields silk, woven in London by Huguenot Simon Julins, after a pattern drawn by silk designer Anna Maria Garthwaite. The visual codes of this portrait and silk dress illuminate how eighteenth-century Americans used Atlantic World material culture to visually express identity. Each chapter of my dissertation takes one of these enigmatic people as the departure point for discussing visual and material culture related to them. As they created and used objects, they also fashioned and displayed personal, political, cultural, and aesthetic identities. My dissertation explores the cultural resonance of Atlantic World material culture in America: a resonance forever captured in this single portrait.

In the American revolutionary era, the lives of three artist-Patriots, each notable American firsts, overlapped in London: Prince Demah (first identifiable enslaved portraitist), Robert Edge Pine (founder of the first art museum), and Patience Wright (first sculptor). Neglected or erased, their histories counter popular misconceptions about a whitewashed founding era that have encouraged structural racism, sexism, and nativism. Partnering with one of our groundbreaking cultural institutions, the Museum of the American Revolution, this project highlights the pivotal contributions women, Black people, and immigrants made to an American Revolution that was a global civil war. Its public humanities projects include a monograph, museum exhibition, graphic novel, and material culture "vlog." Delaware’s Am Civ program, characterized by doing history through material culture, has long trained emerging PhDs to pursue diverse professional pathways in the public humanities. This project will reinvigorate the University of Delaware American Civilizations program’s career diversity and material culture training in exciting new ways through deepening our connections to a cultural institution that exemplifies using objects to bring cutting-edge scholarship to broad audiences.