ProfessorMary Roberts

BA Hons (Sydney), PhD (Melbourne), FAHA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities)

Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History and Nineteenth-Century Studies. She specializes in nineteenth-century British and Ottoman art with particular expertise in Orientalism, the history of artistic exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe and the culture of travel. Her books include: Istanbul Exchanges. Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-century visual culture (University of California Press, 2015), Intimate Outsiders. The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke, 2007),and five co-edited books: Ottoman Architecture: A Study Published for the 1873 Vienna World's Fair (Gorgias, 2023)The Poetics and Politics of Place. Ottoman Istanbul and British Orientalism (Pera Museum and University of Washington Press, 2011) Edges of Empire. Orientalism and Visual Culture (Blackwells, 2005), Orientalism's Interlocutors, (Duke, 2002) and Refracting Vision. Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Power Publications, 2000/2012). Her next book, Four Thresholds: Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities is under contract with The University of Chicago Press.

Mary has been awarded residential fellowships at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, (2014-15), the Clark Art Institute and Oakley Center for the Humanities (2009-10), the Getty Research Institute (2008-9), Yale Center for British Art (1999 and 2008), and was a visiting scholar at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University (2011-12). Her research has also been supported by grants from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian Research Council. She has been invited to speak at the Getty Research Institute, The Freer/Sackler Galleries in Washington, the Courtauld Institute of Art, Tate Britain, Northwestern, University of Michigan, Bosphorus University, University of Fribourg, Switzerland, the Yale Center for British Art, CUNY, Boston University, MIT and Pera Museum, Istanbul.