Jennifer L. Roberts

Jennifer L. Roberts is Professor of History of Art and Architecture. She teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, with particular focus on issues of landscape, expedition, material culture theory, and the history of science.

Her book Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History was published in 2004 by Yale University Press. It examines the ways in which Smithson's celebrated earthworks and traveling projects of the 1960s and 70s confront the social and material histories of the sites they occupy. She has published numerous essays and reviews on 19th and 20th century American art and material culture, and is a co-author of the Prentice Hall textbook American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2007).

Her current book project (Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America) traces the dispatch and transit of images through the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. 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.

Professor Roberts is serving, and/or has served, on the following American Civilization dissertation committee(s):

“Beyond Broken Glass: Looking at the South Bronx in Ruin” (Peter L’Official)

"American Whaling in Culture and Memory, 1820-1930" (Jamie L. Jones)

"Object Lessons in American Culture" (Sarah Carter)

“‘The Remainder of our Effects We Must Leave Behind’: American Loyalists and the Meaning of Things, 1765-1800” (Katherine Rieder)

“Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture in the 1960s” (Miguel deBaca)

Contact information:
Jennifer Roberts, History of Art and Architecture Department.