Rate My Professor Mary Roberts

Professor Mary Roberts serves as Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies and the John Schaeffer Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She obtained her BA (Hons) from the University of Sydney and her PhD from the University of Melbourne. Roberts is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), elected in 2016. Her research specializations encompass nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art, with particular expertise in cosmopolitanism, global art histories, and late Ottoman visual culture. Throughout her career at the University of Sydney, she has held key academic appointments, including leadership in research projects funded by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), such as the SRRRP grant in 2018. She has convened the Art History Seminar Series and contributed to the Power Institute activities.

Roberts has produced seminal works including Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists, and Artists in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2015), which received the Best Book Prize from the Historians of Islamic Art Association and was translated into Turkish, and Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Scripts of Delights (Duke University Press, 2007). She co-edited Orientalism's Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Duke University Press). Her recent publications include 'Worlding on the Hudson: Frederic Church and Global Histories of Art' in Art History (2022). Roberts' impact is evident in prestigious fellowships such as the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor in Art History at Williams College, Royden B. Davis Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Georgetown University, and invited lectures at institutions including MIT, Columbia University, and the American Academy in Rome. She serves on the board of Historians of British Art and has engaged in numerous public lectures and committee roles, advancing scholarship in nineteenth-century art.