Jennifer L. Roberts

Jennifer L. Roberts is an art historian whose scholarship focuses on the interface between the arts and the natural sciences, the history and theory of craft and materiality, and the history of print. After receiving her A.B. in English and Art History from Stanford (1992) and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale (2000), she joined the Harvard faculty in 2002. She held the Slade Professorship in Fine Arts at Cambridge University in 2019 and delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in 2021. Her geographic/historical specialization is in American art from the 18th century to the present, but her work has expanded beyond this field in recent years.

Roberts is currently working on two projects that aim to challenge the binary divisions that are assumed to exist between the humanities and the sciences. She is outlining a new book and series of courses on the reciprocity of art and astrophysics. And, with artist Dario Robleto, she is co-writing a book about the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA's Voyager Golden Record in 1977. These signatures are now 14 billion miles away, outside of the solar system. Titled The Heartbeat at the Edge of the Solar System, the book is supported by the Sloan Foundation and explores the implications of this interstellar message within the longer history of recording graphic signals from the body.

In her scholarship and curating, Roberts has consistently emphasized the material intelligence of art and its makers and the challenge of storing and transmitting meaning through space and time. Her first book, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), examines everything from crystallography to eschatology to show how Smithson built material models of time to confront the erasures of traditional history. Her book Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), forges a material history of visual communication by tracing the literal transportation of pictures through the swamps, forests, oceans, and cities of the Anglo-American landscape between 1760 and 1860. In 2012 she curated the exhibition Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print for the Harvard Art Museums. That project sparked her interest in the generative power of the physical operations of printing – reversal, pressure, transfer, incision, etc. – and led to her forthcoming book with Princeton University Press, based on her Mellon Lectures, titled Contact: Art and the Pull of Print.

Roberts has long advocated for the value of making as a form of historical and interpretive research. She was the co-founder of Harvard's Minding Making Project (now on hiatus), which hosted a series of workshops exploring artisanal knowledge as a bridge between the humanities and the fine, decorative, scientific, and industrial arts. She teaches a course with artist Matt Saunders that fully integrates the theory and history of printmaking with studio practice. Her own photography has taken on an increasingly formative role in her scholarly work. Her images will be featured in a forthcoming book about Harvard's astronomical glass plate photograph collection. For more on all facets of her current work, see her Instagram account @jenniferrrrrroberts.

Recent Publications

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