Robin Kelsey

Robin Kelsey joined the Harvard faculty in 2001 and has been Shirley Carter Burden Professor since 2009. From 2016 to 2024, he served as Dean of Arts & Humanities, and prior to that he served as Chair of the Department of History of Art & Architecture. He has also served as President of the Harvard College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and, for over a decade, Chair or Co-Chair of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts. In 2018 he was selected to represent the faculty of the University at the installation of Lawrence Bacow as Harvard’s 29th President. He holds a PhD from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School and has practiced law in California.

A specialist in the histories of photography, modernism, and American art, Professor Kelsey has published on such topics as the role of chance in photography, geographical survey photography, landscape theory, ecology and historical interpretation, picture theory, and the nexus of art and law. His book Photography and the Art of Chance was published by Harvard University Press in 2015, and his book, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, was published by the University of California Press in 2007. With Blake Stimson, he co-edited a book entitled The Meaning of Photography, published by the Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press in 2008. In 2004, he was awarded the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize by the College Art Association for an essay on the photography of Timothy H. O’Sullivan. He has held several fellowships, including a Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, and in 2006 received Harvard’s Roslyn Abramson Award for excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates. In 2010-2011, he was the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College and, for five weeks, a visiting professor at the École normalesupérieure, Paris, under the auspices of the Terra Foundation for American Art.