15 Faculty Hot Shots: Jennifer Roberts
While Professor Jennifer L. Roberts works with artifacts hundreds of years old, she’s in no danger of gathering moss herself. As the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, specializing in American art from the colonial age to modernism, she constantly strives to enliven her subject, locating art objects in vibrant contexts. “It’s important for students to understand that art objects are very dense objects, just as dense as a novel or scientific treatise,” says Roberts. “These are real historical documents that are filled with information.”
A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford, Roberts did not even discover her interest in art history until senior year. “I started out in human biology, which I did for two years, then I switched to English, and ended up my senior year double majoring in English and Art History.” Roberts says that what really drew her to art history was the interdisciplinary aspect of the field, which allowed her to apply her knowledge of biology, history, science, geology, engineering, literature, and even philosophy. As she describes art history, “It’s an infinite field for intellectual curiosity.”
Harvard students can’t seem to get enough of Roberts. Last fall, her seminar on pop art attracted three times the class’s capacity. No doubt Roberts’ methods had a great deal to do with the popularity of the course, as well as the subject matter. “The readings can be very difficult, like readings about theories of modernism,” Roberts explains. “But every week, I give the students a single image to think about, and they are all expected to think about that image as they do that reading. We spend much of that week’s discussion talking about that image— I think it gives people something really concrete on which to focus their reading.”
“She brings a unique perspective and a high level of scholarship that, when combined with her approachable nature, makes her an outstanding professor,” says Vanessa R. Dube ’10, a future senior thesis advisee of Roberts’ and a Crimson editorial editor. The professor’s popularity extends beyond the HAA department. In 2005, Professor Roberts was selected by the then-junior class of the College to give one of only four lectures to parents during Junior Parents Weekend.
The academic world has also recognized Roberts’ talent. She has received numerous prestigious fellowships, won four awards for excellence in teaching undergraduates, and has published two books, with a third to be released next year. Katie A. Pfohl, a teaching fellow for Roberts’ HAA 17y : “American Encounters: Art, Contact, & Conflict 1560-1860” praises her, saying that “she teaches students to construct an interface between objects of history and culture in an incredibly evocative and dynamic way.” Robin E. Kelsey, the Loeb Professor of Humanities, has only glowing things to say about Roberts, as well. “She is a model colleague, who brings diligence and creativity to every departmental endeavor.”
Roberts normally inaugurates every HAA 1 course, an introduction to general art history that features a different professor each week, with a lecture on the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. The Spiral Jetty is a 1,500 foot-long earthwork made of rocks, mud and salt that juts into the Great Salt Lake. The land art is left totally unprotected against nature—it dips below water level, changes color and erodes. Roberts says that she chooses this piece every year to “break down people’s assumptions about art history right away. It’s not just a painting on the wall— you can’t possibly separate it from its environment.” The Spiral Jetty illustrates Roberts’ central message of art interacting with life, and her point seems to be getting across to students. “From her classes, I have learned to investigate art and everyday objects which seem benign,” says Dube, “and to unpack and question the loaded meanings that these objects can have for their users, and for society at large.”