I am Associate Professor in Art and Material Cultures of Britain in the History of Art Department at University College London. My research broadly explores material and technical histories of modern visual media, but I am best known as an expert in colour film history.

My first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (2023), asked how new colour media transformed the way Britain saw itself and its empire across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and was honoured with both the BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award and the MSA First Book Prize. My interest in the colonial and post-colonial histories of colour also underpinned the AHRC-funded Bombay Film Colour Research Network, which I co-convened with Prof. Ranjani Mazumdar. This project expanded my previous work on the global history of colour cinema, including the article I published with Zhaoyu Zhu on colour filmmaking during China’s Cultural Revolution (“Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor?”), which received both the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award and the Screen Biennial Award. 

Before joining UCL I was a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University and a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. I received my PhD from Yale University in History of Art and Film Studies in 2018, during which I spent time as a fellow in MoMA’s department of painting and sculpture, and at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

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.