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, fashion, gender, and transatlantic issues. Her expertise covers the visual and material culture of Spain, primarily from the second half of the eighteenth century. Her research interests include the artistic construction of Spanish identity and nationalism in painting, prints, fashion plates, and decorative arts. She has published articles in Dieciocho, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture and has written book reviews for CAA-online. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript, The Spanish Body: Nationalism, Fashion, and Visual Culture in the Revolutionary Period, and has an article forthcoming on the artistic formation of celebrity bullfighters in The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2012).

Zanardi received her MA and PhD from the University of Virginia. She has held previous teaching posts at Roger Williams University, Appalachian State University, and the University of Virginia. She has given lectures on artistic representations of bullfighting in the 1790s and early 1800s and the relationship between fashion and art at the Bourbon court in Spain at conferences for the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and CAA. She has also chaired sessions for the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture. Zanardi has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain and United States, and the American Association of University Women.