Dr Nicholas Robbins

Nicholas Robbins is a Lecturer in British Art 1700-1900. His research and teaching explore the visual cultures of the modern Atlantic world, with a focus on the intersections of art history with histories of science and the environment. His first book, The Late Weather, traces climate's emergence as a central subject of scientific representation and artistic experiment in nineteenth century Britain. 

He received his BA and PhD in art history at Yale University. Before joining the UCL History of Art Department in 2020, he worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. In 2023-24, he was on leave as a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He is a member of the editorial group of the Oxford Art Journal.

Research

My work is primarily concerned with the shifting interfaces between aesthetic experience and knowledge in the long nineteenth century, with a focus on artists and scientists working in Britain and its former empire. I aim to recover both the epistemological significance of art practices and the aesthetic complexity of scientific and environmental thinking. Other interests include the history of photography, theories of genre, empire and settler colonialism, the history of racial formation, and problems of method in the environmental humanities.  

In my current book project, The Late Weather, I examine the emergence of climate as a central subject of artistic experimentation and scientific representation in nineteenth-century Britain. Working with a broad range of objects - landscape paintings, scientific diagrams, architectural drawings, and photographic substrates - the project examines new modes of apprehending environmental wholeness that were shaped by ideologies of standardisation, colonial homogeneity, and racial difference. It offers a new genealogy of image forms that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century and which continue to shape (and limit) our apprehension of climate in an era of ecological breakdown. An essay drawn from this research, published in The Art Bulletin, received the Emerging Scholars Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. 

Some recent essays have addressed the political and environmental valences of elemental materials - such the rocks that litter Fitz Henry Lane's paintings, the unruly atmospheres of the panorama, and the way freshwater infrastructures offered a model for ecological image-making. A new longer-term project will consider the relationship between genre, natural history, and the idea of the ‘individual’ in art in the decades around 1800. I am also at work on a number of collaborative projects about environmental determinism, art-historical graphic images, and the botanical coordinates of Victorian art and poetry.

Specialisms
Art and visual culture in Britain and the former British empire, 1700-1900; history of science; environmental humanities.

Selected Publications

• “Forms of Water: Infrastructure and Improvement in the Nineteenth Century”, in Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis, eds. Melinda McCurdy and Karla Nielsen (New Haven: Yale University Press; Pasadena: Huntington Library, 2024), 29–65.
• “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate,” The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (June 2021): 50–76.
• “Ruskin, Whistler, and the Climate of Art in 1884,” in Ruskin’s Ecologies, eds. Kelly Freeman and Thomas Hughes (London: Courtauld Books Online, 2021), 203–223.
• “Atmospheric Regulation in the Panorama,” Grey Room 83, (Spring 2021): 56–81.
• “Rock-Bound: Fitz Henry Lane in 1862,” Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 1 (March 2021): 105–23.

Full publications list on UCL Profiles.

Teaching

• HART0032: Methodologies of Art History
• HART0056: Prints and Printmaking
• HART0173: Art and Science in Britain, 1750-1900
• HART0174: Landscape: Empire, Environment, Industry
• HART0178: Histories of Ecological Form 

PhD Supervision

• Daen Huse, ‘Hand-Held Ephemera in Nineteenth-Century Peru’, second supervisor (supervisor: Emily Floyd)
• Dan Ward, ‘So That You Can Live: Art and Politics in Britain, 1982-1997’, second supervisor (supervisor: Stephanie Schwartz)
• Tom Cornelius, ‘American Surfaces: Topographies of the New West’, second supervisor (supervisor: Stephanie Schwartz )

Contact

Office: 307, 21 Gordon Square
Office hours: Tuesdays 12-1pm and Thursdays 12-1pm. Book here.
Email: n.robbins@ucl.ac.uk