Anya Zilberstein

Anya Zilberstein (PhD, History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Program, MIT 2008) joined the History Department in 2007. Current research interests include the history of climate science, food sciences and the British Empire, animals, and race. Her main book project, “Poor Creatures: Food Welfare for People and Other Animals,” examines how and why animal welfare and human welfare were intertwined in debates about food security in Britain and its rapidly changing empire in the eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries.

Among other publications, 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 Book Prize; and four co-edited volumes: "Creatures of History: Animals and the History of Natural History,” Animal History 1: 3 (September 2025); “History and Other Unbounded Disciplines,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 54:3 (Winter 2024); “Empowering Appetites: The Political Economy and Culture of Food in the Atlantic World,” Early American Studies 19: 2 (Spring 2021); and “Food Matters: Critical Histories of Food and the Sciences,” Osiris 35 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

She welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in environmental history (including climate history, animal history), the history of science, the Atlantic world ca. 1500-1800, early North American history, and food history.