I am a lecturer in Film and Media at University College London. Working across the disciplines of Film Studies and Art History, I specialise in material and technical histories of visual media, particularly in Britain and British imperial contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

My award-winning first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (2023), considers 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. This interest in the colonial and post-colonial histories of colour also underpins the AHRC Bombay Film Colour Research Network, which I co-convene with Prof. Ranjani Mazumdar. I am currently working on a new project exploring the movement of British artists’ materials around the world from the nineteenth century.

I received my PhD in History of Art with Film Studies in 2018 from Yale University and was subsequently a Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. I previously spent time as a Museum Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and as a Junior Research Fellow at The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. 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”. My official UCL profile (and email address) is here.