Jennifer L. Roberts

Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture

American art

 

On leave 2007-8

 

Sackler Museum 507

485 Broadway

Cambridge, MA  02138

roberts6@fas.harvard.edu

617-496-0116

fax 617-495-1769

 

Professor Roberts teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, with particular interests in landscape, travel, the history of science, and the history and theory of material culture. She is the author of Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (Yale University Press, 2004) and a co-author of the textbook American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (Prentice Hall, 2007). Her book in progress, a study of the transit of images prior to the Civil War, is Transporting Visions: the Movement of Images in Early America.

 

 

EDUCATION

Yale University, History of Art, Ph.D. 2000

Stanford University, Art History and English, A.B. 1992

 

TEACHING

Courses Offered:

 

HAA17y:   American Encounters: Art, Contact, and Conflict 1565-1865

HAA172w: American Art and Modernity, 1865-1965

HAA175w: Pop Art

HAA175s: Art and Science in Early America

HAA175x: The Gilded Age

HAA275w: The Thing

HAA276x: The Art of Expedition in Nineteenth-Century America

 

Tutorials:

 

HAA98ar: Trompe-l'oeil and the Practice of Deception (Fall 2002)

HAA98ar: Robert Rauschenberg (Fall 2003)

HAA98ar: Ornament, Essence, and Interiority (Fall 2004)

 

 

AMERICAN ART AT HARVARD

Information for prospective students

Students of American art at Harvard are encouraged to pursue research in a broad range of topics and historical periods. Dissertations currently underway concern everything from Puritan art of the seventeenth century to minimal sculpture in the 1960s.    

 

Along with Professor Roberts, several other Harvard faculty members offer instruction in American art. These include Robin Kelsey (history of photography and 19th/20th century American art), Benjamin Buchloh (post-WWII American and European), Carrie Lambert-Beatty (post-1960 with an emphasis on video and performance), and Neil Levine (modern architecture). Suzanne Blier teaches African and African-American art, and Thomas Cummins teaches Precolumbian/Colonial art and is currently directing several dissertation projects concerned with borderlands studies and Spanish Colonial North America.

 

Links to campus resources:

American art collections at the Fogg Art Museum

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

The Program in the History of American Civilization

Department of African and African American Studies

Department of Visual and Environmental Studies

David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies

Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History

The Humanities Center

 

For application procedures, see the Admissions information for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

 

For general information about the department, including course requirements, see the departmental website (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hoart/). You may also consult the Director of Graduate Studies, Hugo van der Velden, at velden@fas.harvard.edu.

 

Thank you for your interest in the program!