Rate My Professor Nina Dubin

Nina Dubin is the Circle Associate Professor of European Art Since 1660 in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies and holds an affiliated appointment in the Department of French and Francophone Studies within Arts and Culture. A specialist in European art since 1660, her research examines the production of art amid an early modern culture of risk, including the eighteenth-century cult of ruins shaped by economic uncertainties, the role of aesthetics in the credit economy, and the intersections of economic and romantic trust evident in objects like Mississippi Bubble caricatures and French love letter pictures. She earned her PhD in History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006 (dissertation: Futures and Ruins: The Painting of Hubert Robert), MA from Berkeley in 2000, and BA cum laude in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in 1996.

Dubin began her career at UIC as Assistant Professor in 2006, promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. Her scholarly contributions include the monograph Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Getty Research Institute, 2010; paperback 2013), co-authored Meltdown! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2020) with essays on the 1720 financial crisis, and the article “Eros, Inc.: Cupid, Capital, and the Crash of 1720” in Art History (September 2024). Other key works feature “Man of Numbers” in the Casanova exhibition catalogue (2017) and “The Catiline Conspiracy and the Credibility of Letters in French Revolutionary Art” (2016). She co-edited the Journal18 special issue “1720” (2020) and co-curated the exhibition Fortune and Folly in 1720 at the New York Public Library (2021-2022). Dubin has received major fellowships such as the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (2013-2014), Florence Gould Foundation Fellowship at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2017), Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College (2018), Getty Research Institute Residential Fellowship (2005-2006), and UIC Institute for the Humanities Fellowship (2021-2022), along with multiple Dean’s Research Prizes (2009, 2012, 2019). She has delivered invited lectures at Harvard University, National Gallery of Art, University of Minnesota, and Southern Methodist University, among others.