Anya Zilberstein

Anya Zilberstein (Ph.D. 2008, M.I.T., History, Anthropology, Science, Technology, and Society Doctoral Program) joined the Department of History in 2007. She offers courses on early America, the Atlantic world 1500-1800, environmental history, science and empire, slavery, food and agricultural history, and historical methods.

She is the author of: A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback 2019), winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize.

co-editor, with E.C. Spary, of "Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences," Osiris 35 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

co-editor with Jennifer Anderson of the special issue "Empowering Appetites: The Political Economy and Culture of Food in the Early Atlantic World," Early American Studies 19. 2 (Spring 2021).

co-editor with Anne E.C. McCants of the special issue "History and Other Unbounded Disciplines," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 54. 3 (Winter 2024).

Current research interests include the history of climate science, food sciences and the British Empire, the history of ornithology, and the history of migration and race. Her main book project, “Fodder for Empire: Feeding People Like Other Animals,” examines the history of experiments in producing and distributing cheap, high-calorie food in non-perishable forms for working people and working animals after the unprecedented expansion of British colonial territory in North America and elsewhere following the Seven Years’ War.