Robin Jensen, SARTS President, is the Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and Worship at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses in both the Department of the History of Art and the Divinity School. She is also the Director of the Luce Foundation-funded program Religion and the Arts in Contemporary Culture (at Vanderbilt Divinity School). Most of her research and writing focused on the interpretation of early Christian art and architecture, partially by consideration of ritual practices and dogmatic considerations as revealed through liturgical documents, homilies, and other textual evidence.
Her courses, however, range more broadly and include seminars on Jewish and Christian pictorial hermeneutics; visual represenations of God, the Trinity, Christ and the Virgin Mary; a multi-disciplinary introduction to the history of Christian liturgy; as well as lecture-based courses on the art of the Christian empire, and the portrait in Late Antiquity.
Robin’s books include Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000); Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Fortress, 2005) and The Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith and the Christian Community (Eerdmans, 2004). With Kimberly Vrudney, she has recently edited a collection of essays: Visual Theology (Liturgical Press, 2009). In addition to being the current President of SARTS, she serves on the editorial boards of Faith and Form, The Journal of Early Christian Studies, and Cross Currents. She is a past Vice-President of the International Catacomb Society and currently serves on the Program Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature.