Profile
Tara Zanardi teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European art that consider a wide range of topics, such as art and politics, the development of museums, national identities and cultural representations, porcelain, fashion, gender, global exchange, and empire.
Zanardi received her MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. She has received fellowships from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fulbright Program, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and United States, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown Library, Hunter College’s Presidential Fund for Faculty Advancement, PSC-CUNY, and the American Association of University Women. She was also a Feliks Gross Endowment Award winner in 2014.
Her expertise and research interests cover eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish visual and material culture. Zanardi has published articles and reviews in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture; The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Material Culture Review; Dieciocho; Journal18; Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture; and Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture. Zanardi has published three books, Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Pennsylvania State University, 2016); Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Lynda Klich; and Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir (Bloomsbury, 2023), co-edited with Christopher M.S. Johns. She has published essays in various edited volumes, including Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate 2016) and Things Change: Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century (Bloomsbury 2023). She has also co-edited a special issue of Journal18 on “Silver” (Fall 2022).
Zanardi’s current work comprises multiple projects, including an essay on “Winged Beasts for Charles III” for the volume Exhibiting Animals (2024) and a special issue on “Wonder Women” for Eighteenth-Century Life. Her current book, The Porcelain Room at Aranjuez: Charles III, Imperial Politics, and Natural History, which has been supported by multiple fellowships, is nearly complete.