Zara Anishanslin, de University of Delaware, présentera sa communication « Designing the Botanical Landscape of Empire: Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763), Silk Designer », le jeudi 12 octobre 2017, de 17h30 à 19h30. Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, 75006, salle D421.

Discutante : Ariane Fennetaux (Université Paris Diderot)

Résumé :

“Enigmatic Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688-1763) was one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers. She also was one of its most prolific. A clergyman’s daughter with family connections to the Royal Society of London and Chelsea Physic Garden, she had intimate ties to global natural history networks that found aesthetic expression in her design work. Garthwaite used her designs to create new hybrid English landscapes that blended native flora with exotic imported botanicals, including plants from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. Her popular designs both mirrored the larger cultural fascination with things botanical and helped foster the craze for wearing botanical landscapes in silk around the British Empire. Objects that embodied important intersections between fashion and science, her textile designs carried the same eighteenth-century fascination with flowers and botanicals eagerly embraced by men in global natural history networks. This paper looks at women who made and wore silk on both sides of the Atlantic to explore how Garthwaite helped design the botanical landscape of empire.”

Zara Anishanslin specializes in Early Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. Since 2016, she has been Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware where she is working on a new research project on the American Revolution. Anishanslin holds a PhD in the History of American Civilization from the University of Delaware, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins University and the New York Historical Society. Her book Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) examines the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented silk: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain’s few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant’s wife, and a New England painter.

Cette séance est financée par le LARCA (Paris Diderot) et l’IUF (Projet « L’Europe des objets », Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise)

Contact : Sandrine Parageau (sparageau@parisnanterre.fr)