Professor Roberts teaches art history and material studies with an emphasis on connections between the arts and the natural sciences. She is the author of several books, including Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History  (2004), Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America  (2014), and Contact: Art and the Pull of Print  (2024).  Her latest work explores the reciprocity of art and astronomy, including a new project about the concept of the “artifact” in space imaging, a study of the women who analyzed Harvard’s glass plate astronomical collection in the late nineteenth century, and a forthcoming book, co-authored with artist Dario Robleto, about the EEG and EKG signatures that were engraved into NASA’s Voyager Golden Record in 1977 and launched into interstellar space.