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Jennifer Roberts Named Professor of History of Art and Architecture
Cambridge, Mass. - August 27, 2009 - Art historian Jennifer L. Roberts, whose scholarship has transformed her field's approach to American art, has been named professor of history of art and architecture in Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2009.
Roberts was previously Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2002.
"Professor Roberts' skill in situating objects within historical and aesthetic contexts, her interpretive brilliance, and her theoretical sophistication make her scholarship exceptionally appealing," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in FAS. "Her range is unusually broad, extending from early modern to contemporary American art. She is a magnet for students seeking new models of analysis of American art, and brings stellar teaching skills to the classroom."
Roberts' research has ranged across the work of American artists as diverse as the colonial Boston portraitist John Singleton Copley; 19th-century artist-entrepreneur John James Audubon, best known for his Birds of America; and Robert Smithson, a noted installation artist of the post-World War II era.
In her first book, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (Yale University Press, 2004), Roberts provided a fresh take on one of the most significant American artists of the last half-century. Challenging the dominant view of Smithson, Roberts connected his dystopic postmodern visions of the natural world to the crisis of historical thought in the late twentieth century. Her analysis examines the ways in which Smithson's celebrated earthworks and traveling projects of the 1960s and 1970s confront the social and material histories of the sites they occupy, focusing particularly on Spiral Jetty (1970), perhaps Smithson's best-known work, as at once an attempt to preserve history and a drive to destroy it.
In a new book project titled Pictures in Transit: Matter, Memory, and Migration in Early American Art, Roberts moves backward in time to the origins of American art in the 18th and 19th centuries, examining major figures such as Copley, Audubon, and Asher B. Durand. Treating pictures that register, in various ways, the complications of their own transmission, the book explores the relationship between communication/transportation media and period understandings of visual representation. By analyzing such phenomena in early American visual culture, her work is drawing important parallels between this early American art and more recent works.
Roberts holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, awarded in 1992, and a Ph.D. from Yale University, awarded in 2000. She was a postdoctoral faculty fellow at Syracuse University from 2000 to 2002, when she joined Harvard as an assistant professor.
At Harvard, she has received the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for Excellence in the Work of Undergraduates and in the Art of Teaching three times, and received the Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence in teaching undergraduates in 2005.
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