Robin Kelsey is Dean of Arts and Humanities and Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He holds a PhD in art history from Harvard and a JD from Yale Law School and has practiced law in California. 

A specialist in the history of photography, Dean Kelsey is the author of Photography and the Art of Chance, published by Harvard University Press in 2015, and Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890, published by the University of California Press in 2007. With Blake Stimson, he co-edited a book entitled The Meaning of Photography, published by the Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press in 2008. Dean Kelsey has held visiting professorships at Williams College and the École normale supériere, Paris, and has received various awards for his scholarship and teaching, including the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize, a Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship, and the Rosalyn Abramson Award.