Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design
Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design and Experimental Foundation Studies
Christopher Roberts teaches in the Theory, History of Art and Design department as well as the Experimental and Foundation Studies division at RISD. He is from Baltimore, MD and earned his PhD in Africology and African American Studies from Temple University and an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University. As a Black Studies scholar, they are concerned with Black geographies of memory and forgetting, with an emphasis on port cities in the United States that anchored the transatlantic and domestic slave trades. Chris’ research traipses the contours of architecture, photography, creative writing, literary criticism, art criticism, museum studies and art history. By way of historical analysis framed through a Black Studies lens, Chris is striving to unravel the entanglements of race and coloniality that suture our conceptions of monuments, maps, archives and museums as concrete representations of the past in order to break the hold they have on our public and private spatial imaginations.
In the classroom, he teaches everyone from first-year undergraduates to graduate students at RISD. With a pedagogical practice that stretches across studio, lecture and seminar courses, Chris is able to see the college in a unique way. He uses creative assignments and critical questioning to draw connections between robust theoretical texts and expansive troves of artworks that resound with students’ lived experiences and makerly practices. He serves as a regular guest critic in the Architecture department and an occasional critic in other spaces across campus. Chris was the recipient of the 2022–23 Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at RISD.
Moreover, Chris is one of the faculty coordinators of the First Generation College-Pre Orientation Program (FGC-POP) as well as a faculty mentor in the Project Thrive Program. For him, working with these students, faculty and staff members is inextricably enmeshed in his pedagogical and scholarly practices.
Courses
Fall 2024 Courses
THAD H101-04 - THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
Period Fall 2024
Credits 3
FormatLecture
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
THAD H101-04
THAD I: GLOBAL MODERNISMS
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
PeriodFall 2024
Credits3
FormatLecture
ModeIn-Person
Start and End2024-09-04 to 2024-12-11
Times: TTH | 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM; T | 11:20 AM - 12:50 PMInstructor(s): Christopher RobertsLocation(s): Auditorium, Room 132; College Building, Room 431Enrolled / Capacity: 20Status: Closed
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This is a required course for all first year and transfer students to introduce them to global modern and contemporary art, architecture and design in the period between 1750 and the present. The course addresses modernism as a global project, presenting several case studies from across the world that unfold to show how multiple kinds of modernism developed in different times and distant places. By presenting alternate, sometimes contradictory stories about modern and contemporary art and design, along with a set of critical terms specific to these times and places, the class aims to foster a rich, complex understanding of the many narratives that works of art and design can tell. With this grounding, students will be well positioned to pursue their interests in specialized courses in subsequent semesters.
Registration process:
First-year students are registered into sections by the Liberal Arts Division.
Incoming transfer students and sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates should register into section 27.
Major Requirement | BFA
THAD H191-01 - HUMANITY OR NAH?: BLACKNESS, GENDER, RESISTANCE, AND MEMORY IN MONUMENTS, MAPS, AND ARCHIVES
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
Period Fall 2024
Credits 3
FormatLecture
Mode In-Person
Start date
End date
THAD H191-01
HUMANITY OR NAH?: BLACKNESS, GENDER, RESISTANCE, AND MEMORY IN MONUMENTS, MAPS, AND ARCHIVES
LevelUndergraduate
UnitTheory + History of Art + Design
Subject Theory & History of Art & Design
PeriodFall 2024
Credits3
FormatLecture
ModeIn-Person
Start and End2024-09-04 to 2024-12-11
Times: TH | 9:40 AM - 12:40 PMInstructor(s): Christopher RobertsLocation(s): Washington Place, Room 302Enrolled / Capacity: 25Status: Closed
SECTION DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to be a deep-dive into the liberatory archaeologies of racialized, gendered, and sexual memory(s) articulated by Xicanx, Latinx, Native American, and Africana scholars, artists, creatives, activists, and cultural workers that resist the epistemic regimes of antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy. Students have the opportunity to engage scholarly and artistic works that exemplify how Blackness rejects while simultaneously marking in many ways, the limits and logic of gender and sexuality, exposing the colonial underpinnings of "Man" and modern ideas of "human." This course focuses on monuments, maps, and archives as three distinct sites where antiblackness, colonialism, and white supremacy are both sanctioned and defied in the public sphere. Students will examine research from multiple scholars that troubles the assumption that becoming assimilated and included as "human" and "citizen" in the eyes of the State is progress for Black and Native communities. Using the Black Digital Humanities, students will demonstrate their comprehension and command of the thematic foundations of the course by creating their own narratives of memory and resistance via spatial visualization and/or auditory digital software.
