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. Thereafter, 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). 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. thesis. Since 1984 she has taught full time in the Art and Art History Department at Rutgers University and was Chairperson for four of those years. Many of her fifty publications have been book-length catalogues for exhibitions at such museums as the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; 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. During the last eight years, she has developed six other grant-funded new interdisciplinary courses with professors of American, German and English literature, and computer animation.