Dr Nicholas Robbins

Research summary

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 am at work on a book, The Late Weather, that traces climate's emergence as a central subject of scientific representation and artistic experiment in the nineteenth century. 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, imperial homogeneity, and racial difference. The book illuminates the development of new aesthetic forms adequate to climate’s temporal scale and the elusive phenomena - light, air, heat, moisture - of which it is composed. 

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. Other ongoing research projects include questions of individuation and incarceration in the drawings of George Romney; exhibition cultures and the spatialised articulation of racial difference in the early nineteenth century; elemental mediums and the deposition of history in the work of artists and thinkers like Charles Babbage, Winslow Homer, and Elizabeth Bishop; and a longer-term project about the ‘individual’ in art in the decades around 1800.

I am also working on a number of collaborative projects. With Sria Chatterjee and other colleagues, I am working on a project about the role environmental determinism and climate knowledge has played in shaping narratives of cultural history. Allie Stielau and I are developing collaborative research on the history of graphic modes of art-historical representation, considering the ways in which different non-photographic image forms -- the diagram, the chart, the reconstruction, and more -- are mobilised to analyse works of art and historical change. 

Selected publications

Articles and Chapters

‘John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate’, The Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (June 2021): 50–76.

‘Rock-Bound: Fitz Henry Lane in 1862’, Oxford Art Journal 44, no. 1 (March 2021): 105–23.

‘Atmospheric Regulation in the Panorama’, Grey Room 83 (Spring 2021): 56–81.

‘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.

Catalogue Essays 

‘Exhibiting Art in Wartime’, in Bill Brandt | Henry Moore, eds. Martina Droth and Paul Messier (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2020).

‘Working Papers: Thomas Cole’s Early Drawings and Notebooks’, in Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance (Catskill, NY: Thomas Cole National Historical Site; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

‘The Road’, in Hopper Drawing, ed. Carter E. Foster (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013).

Co-authored/edited Volumes

“The Aerial Image,” co-edited with Emily Doucet and Matthew C. Hunter, Grey Room 83 (Spring 2021).

Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance, with Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, Sophie Lynford, and Jennifer Raab (Catskill, NY: Thomas Cole National Historical Site; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

Find out more on Nicholas's RPS Profile.

Teaching and Supervision

My teaching takes a transnational and interdisciplinary approach to the history of modern art and visual culture in Britain and the Atlantic world. My undergraduate courses include ‘Art and Science in Britain, 1750–1900’, ‘Landscape: Empire, Industry, Environment’, and (with Stephanie Schwartz), ‘On Property’. I have also taught methodologies and have developed, with Allie Stielau, an object-focused undergraduate seminar on printmaking that works directly with the rich collections of prints, illustrated books, and artists’ books at UCL.

My MA special subject, ‘Histories of Ecological Form’, provides postgraduate students with an in-depth overview of theoretical approaches from the environmental humanities, interwoven with an exploration of research into the many interfaces between environmental thinking and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in Britain and beyond. 

I welcome research proposals from students interested in pursuing PhD research in the fields of British art, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, and broader topics exploring art history, the history of science, and the environmental humanities. I am second supervisor for a number of PhD students on topics ranging across the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.   

Biography

I studied for my BA and PhD in art history at Yale University, where my dissertation received the Frances Blanshard Prize. I have also worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a research assistant at the Yale Center for British Art, and a guest curator at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. In 2023-24, I was on leave as a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. I joined the UCL History of Art department in 2020.