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Roberta K. Tarbell, Ph.D.

Adjunct Associate Professor

Roberta K. Tarbell spent her early years in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York and graduated from Cornell University in 1965 with a B.S. At the University of Delaware, she earned an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1976) in art history, focusing on American art and modern sculpture, and taught in the art history department (1980-84). From 1984 to 2008, she taught Art History in the Fine Arts Department at Rutgers University, Camden, chaired the department for four years and directed the Museum Studies Program for ten years. Since 1986, as an Adjunct Associate Professor for the Winterthur Museum/UD programs in Art Conservation, she has supervised individual studies and one Ph.D. dissertation and serves on the Joanna Rowntree Memorial Advisory Committee which organized the Deborah Butterfield Lecture in 2008. Currently she is the first Visiting Scholar, Center for American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and co-curator for “Rodin and America,” an exhibition organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University, Stanford CA which will travel to the Rodin Museum, Paris [2011]. Many of her fifty publications have been book-length catalogues for exhibitions at such museums as the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the University of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She contributed several essays to The Dictionary of Art (London: MacMillan, 1996), American National Biography (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) and the Encyclopedia of American Studies (2001) and “Walt Whitman and the Visual Arts,” a chapter in David S. Reynolds, ed., A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman (Oxford University Press, 2000). On an NEH fellowship Professor Tarbell spent the summer of 1997 in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico studying ancient and living Mayan art, anthropology, and archaeology in order to prepare a multidisciplinary course on the subject. She developed other interdisciplinary courses with professors of American, German and English literature, and computer animation.