Jennifer L. Roberts

Jennifer L. Roberts is an award-winning art historian who focuses on the history of interchange between the arts and the sciences, especially astronomy. The author of numerous books and essays on American and European art and science from the eighteenth century to the present, she is also well known for her work on close looking and immersive attention. The close looking assignments she gives her students inspired the weekly ten-minute art challenges in the New York Times, and were featured in Oliver Burkeman’s bestselling book Four Thousand Weeks. She is the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Drew Gilpin Faust Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

Roberts is currently working on several projects that explore reciprocities between art and astrophysics. She has a book forthcoming with Scribner, co-authored with artist Dario Robleto, about the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA’s Voyager Golden Record in 1977 and launched into interstellar space. She is also writing about black hole imaging, teaching a course about the Moon, studying the women who analyzed Harvard’s glass plate astronomical photographs at the turn of the twentieth century, and completing a project about the first image transmitted to the Earth from Mars.

This biography was provided courtesy of the guest artist and has not been not edited or reviewed by the BSO.