I am Associate Professor in Art and Material Cultures of Britain in the History of Art Department at University College London. I specialise in modern British visual culture (in its global and colonial contexts), and am broadly interested in how the materials and technologies used to make images shape their meanings. Much of my recent work has focused on the politics of colour media. 

I received my PhD in History of Art with Film Studies in 2018 from Yale University, where my dissertation was awarded the Frances Blanshard Dissertation Prize. This became my first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (2023), which asked how new colour media transformed the way Britain saw itself and its empire between 1856 and 1968. The book won the BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award and the MSA First Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award and the MLA Prize for a First Book, in addition to long-listing for the Berger Prize for British Art History and commendation from Historians of British Art as Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800–1960. 

Before joining UCL I was a Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge and a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. I previously spent time as a fellow in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture, and at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. In 2024 I was selected as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

*For non-Scottish readers, my first two names are (I am embarrassed to say) pronounced to rhyme with “thirsty sprinkler”. Dootson is (unfortunately) pronounced exactly as you think it is.