American Art Professor Tenured

Former Associate Professor of History and Art and Architecture Jennifer L. Roberts was appointed full professor in the department effective July 1, marking the second tenure in just one year of an American art historian within the historically Eurocentric department.

Roberts said she has adjusted her perspective as an academic and teacher with this recent recognition that American art would have a more substantial presence in the department.

“The first symptom of having tenure, for me, was driving around Cambridge and feeling like I belong here, which I never really felt before,” Roberts said. “I’ve put a huge investment in this department, particularly in building a program in American art because there really wasn’t one 20 years ago...and it’s nice to know now that I can continue to build on that in a more permanent way.”

According to History of Art and Architecture Professor Henri Zerner, Roberts is part of a new generation of younger scholars interested in studying American art with the same kind of investigative intensity and contextualization as those experts in better-entrenched areas of art history.

“Harvard was very late to the study of American art, and I think it’s an exciting moment for the field to have Harvard go from having zero tenured faculty in the field to having two,” said History of Art and Architecture Professor Robin Kelsey, a fellow American art expert who received tenure this past January. “My own enjoyment of getting tenure would have been very half-hearted had she not.”

Kelsey—who calls himself and Roberts “conjoined academic twins”—said his colleague has transformed American art history with her command of an expansive range of time studied. Americanist art history traditionally ends at 1945, after which point artwork is considered within the realm of the contemporary, according to Kelsey. But Roberts challenges the demarcation by intertwining the contemporary moment and the art and social histories of the United States.

The broad spectrum of Roberts’ work is especially apparent in her first book, “Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History,” which developed from her dissertation at Yale. The book examines how the work of land artist Smithson “absorbed, transformed, and sometimes refused the historical traditions that it connected to,” Roberts said.

In the vein of her wide-ranging scholarship, Roberts’s current project—“Pictures in Transit: Matter, Memory, and Migration in Early American Art”—studies how art travels and creates a web of communication between disparate sites.

In her time at Harvard, Roberts—the three-time recipient of the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for Excellence in the Work of Undergraduates and in the Art of Teaching—has duly accrued recognition for her pedagogy, Kelsey said.

“‘Dedicated’ is a weak word to use to describe her devotion to her students and her scholarship,” Kelsey said. “She works amazingly hard.”

Roberts graduated from Stanford University in 1992 and went on to Yale to receive her Ph.D. in 2000. For the following two years, she served as a postdoctoral faculty fellow at Syracuse University. She took a post as an assistant professor at Harvard in 2002.

—Staff writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.