Robin Kelsey

Robin Kelsey is Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and Director of Graduate Studies in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. He is also a member of the Committee on Higher Degrees in the History of American Civilization and a Faculty Associate of the Center for the Environment. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School and has practiced law in California.

A specialist in the histories of photography and American art, Professor Kelsey has published on the role of chance in photographic production, geographical survey photography, landscape theory, and the nexus of art and law. In 2004, he was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association for his essay “Viewing the Archive: Timothy O’Sullivan’s Photographs for the Wheeler Survey, 1871-1874.” His book, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, was published in 2007 by the University of California Press, and his book on photography and chance is scheduled to appear, also from UC Press, in 2010. With Blake Stimson, he co-edited a book entitled The Meaning of Photography, published by the Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press in 2008. He has held several fellowships, including a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, and received several teaching awards, including the Roslyn Abramson Award in 2006 for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates. He is co-chair of the Visual Representation, Transmission, and Translation Seminar at the Humanities Center at Harvard and founder of the Harvard Photography and History Workshop. He currently serves on the Faculty Council and the Docket Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 2010-2011, he will be Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College and a visiting professor at the École normale supérieure, Paris, under the auspices of the Terra Foundation for American Art. He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Sara St. Antoine, their two daughters, and Spenser the cat.

Contact information: See the History of Art and Architecture Department