I am Associate Professor in the Art and Material Culture of Britain in the History of Art Department at University College London. My research explores the materiality of modern visual media technologies with particular expertise in colour media and analogue film. I am currently working on two projects: one about photochemical film laboratories, the other titled “Oil Paint in the Age of Empire” exploring craquelure in nineteenth-century British painting.

My work on the politics of colour media, particularly global colour cinema, has been honoured with various awards. My first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (2023) won the BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award and the MSA First Book Prize, and the article I co-authored with Zhaoyu Zhu, “Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor?” (2020), received both the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award and the Screen Biennial Award. in 2024 I co-founded the Bombay Film Colour Research Network with Ranjani Mazumdar, to produce the first online archive dedicated to colour in Hindi cinema, a project supported by the AHRC.

Most recently I have been researching the materiality of photochemical film, including the forthcoming volume, Film Stock: An International History of a Sensitive Medium (2027), which I co-edited with Alice Lovejoy and Pansy Duncan. Other forthcoming publications on this topic include an essay on Hindustan Photo Film (India’s first film factory), co-authored with Josephine Diecke.

After receiving my PhD from Yale University in 2018 I was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University, then worked as Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. I have also held fellowships at MoMA and the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2024 I was selected as a BBC New Generation Thinker, and am a regular contributor to BBC Radio.

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