Christopher Roberts

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.