About Me

Anna L. Gianelli (formerly Anna L. Weissman)

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I am a curator and scholar specializing in American and European decorative arts, historic interiors, and material culture.​ My work is shaped by an interdisciplinary background in political science, anthropology, and gender studies, and by a longstanding interest in how power takes cultural form. I hold a PhD in Political Science from the University of Florida, where my work centered on nationalism, gender, and sexuality. My earlier scholarship, including Troubling Motherhood: Interrogations of Maternity in Global Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), as well as articles in leading journals and handbooks, examined how norms of gender, reproduction, and national identity shape the boundaries of sociopolitical belonging. 

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Where my earlier scholarship examined power and identity through law, discourse, and political institutions, I now trace them through objects, interiors, and visual culture, asking how material worlds give form to histories of hierarchy, social change, and belonging. My current research lies at the intersection of gender, empire, and material exchange, with particular attention to how domestic interiors and decorative objects encoded racialized and gendered hierarchies in the long eighteenth century. I am especially interested in how maternity, kinship, and fertility functioned as material and visual metaphors of national and imperial reproduction, and in how these meanings circulated through interiors and decorative forms. More broadly, I examine how domestic spaces served as sites where power, identity, and belonging were produced and negotiated through material culture.

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This scholarly perspective also shapes my curatorial practice, which centers on translating collections-based research and close object study into exhibitions and interpretation that are both rigorous and accessible. I have held curatorial and exhibition roles at History Colorado, the Historic Barker Mansion, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where I worked to connect material culture to broader cultural and historical questions through exhibitions, installations, and public-facing scholarship. Across my work, I am committed to creating interpretation that brings scholarly depth to public audiences while opening space for more critical and inclusive ways of understanding the past.