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 questions of materiality, asking how the materials and techniques used to make images shape their meanings. Much of my recent work has focused on colour media as technologies for race-making. 

My first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (2023), asked how new colour media transformed the way Britain saw itself and its empire between 1856 and 1968, revealing colour’s imbrication with the colonial exploitation of Africa, Indian struggles for political independence, and West Indian migration. 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.

My interest in the colonial and post-colonial histories of colour also underpins the AHRC Bombay Film Colour Research Network (2023-2025), which I co-convene with Prof. Ranjani Mazumdar. This project expands my previous work on the global history of colour cinema, including the article I published with Zhaoyu Zhu on colour in the Cultural Revolution (“Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor?”), which received both the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award and the Screen Biennial Award. 

I am currently working on two new projects: with Alice Lovejoy and Pansy Duncan I am co-editing the first volume dedicated to the global history of film stock, and I am also researching the links between imperial travel and artistic techniques in late-Victorian painting in a project provisionally titled ‘Oil Paints in the Age of Empire’. 

I received my PhD in History of Art with Film Studies in 2018 from Yale University, where I was awarded the Frances Blanshard Dissertation Prize. During my PhD I spent time as a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture (2013-14) and as a Junior Research Fellow at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2017). Following my PhD I was appointed the Henry Sidgwick Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge University (2018-21) and subsequently taught Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, before joining UCL in 2023. 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”.