« HOME

The Center

Fellowships

Workshops

Events

Digital

2005-2006 Fellows

Jennifer Roberts

Harvard University
Department of History of Art and Architecture

Jennifer L. Roberts is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.  She teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, with particular interests in issues of landscape, travel, material culture, and the history of science.  She is the author of Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (Yale University Press, 2004).  Roberts received her B.A. in Art History and English from Stanford University in 1992 and her Ph.D. in History of Art from Yale in 2000.

Project Summary

Roberts's project explores the transportation of images in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. By focusing on images designed to be hauled across time and distance - portrait miniatures, peace medallions, paintings-on-tour, and the like - her book will offer a new view of early American visual culture based in period understandings of memory, communication, and media. And by following the paths that these images traced through the physical and social landscape, it will offer a unique perspective on the function of imagery in early American commodity circulation, cross-cultural exchange, geographic expansion, and social cohesion.

How, Roberts asks, were images understood to "carry" across distances? How were they differentiated from verbal signals, and how was their tactile embodiment understood to impact their capacity for transmission? What unique communicative qualities were images understood to have - could they "remember" their passage through space? Absorb and transmit the various gazes that befell them? And - most importantly -- how might such images reflect, at the structural level, the hopes and frustrations attending their own passage? The book will ultimately argue that these hopes and frustrations inflected a broad swath of visual culture in early America.