Robert received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin for a thesis on the work of the artist Marcel Duchamp and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He is an assistant lecturer at Limerick School of Art and Design (Technological University of the Shannon) where he delivers undergrad and postgrad modules on Media Literacy in Art & Design Education. These modules explore how psychoanalytic approaches to art and design give rise to a materially-grounded model of digital literacy, suitable to the challenges posed by AI.
Between 2020-2023 Robert was Curator for Modern & Contemporary Art and, subsequently, Head of Collection Studies at the Louvre Museum’s flagship initiative in the Arabian Gulf, the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Since 2017, he has been adjunct lecturer at the Sorbonne University’s Abu Dhabi campus, where he continues to deliver a postgrad module on Aesthetics and Historiography as part of the MA in History of Art & Museum Studies. Since 2023, he has been a guest lecturer on the MA in Art History, Collections and Curating at University College Dublin. He also intervenes on the MA in Fine Art at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD).
Robert’s teaching and research explore the relation between technology, art and contemporary subjectivity by probing what he terms the ‘infra-disciplinary’ relation between art history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He has published widely in these fields and is the author of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later (Palgrave 2017), a theoretical reading of Duchamp’s most famous readymade marking the centenary of the work’s production. His writings have appeared in French, German and Arabic in collective publications alongside contemporary thinkers such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou (forthcoming), all of whose work he critically engages with. He is a regular contributor to the International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) and Lacunae, the English-language journal published by the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland (APPI). In 2023, he contributed a chapter to Psychoanalysing the Rise of the Small Screen: The Year the Cinemas Closed (Routledge), which explored the notion of ‘Digital Tectonics and Cinematic Intimacy’ in a post-pandemic age.
Robert is currently preparing an article for publication in a special edition of Turia + Kant on the aesthetic writings of Alain Badiou. In a forthcoming contribution to 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long 19th Century, he explores the material link between the daguerreotype and the NFT as the basis for a new model of digital literacy, what he terms a ‘media post-mortem’. This series of publications, which propose a new theoretical reading of the evolving relationship between art, psychoanalysis and technology, forms of the basis of Robert’s current book project focusing specifically on Art, Identity and AI.