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 the materiality of modern visual media technologies. I am working on two projects: one about contemporary analogue filmmaking and photochemical film laboratories, the other titled “Oil Paint in the Age of Empire” exploring nineteenth-century British painting techniques.

I have published widely on the politics of colour media, particularly global cinema, including: my prize-winning first book The Rainbow’s Gravity (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale, 2023) and the 2020 article “Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor?” co-authored with Zhaoyu Zhu, which received both the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award and the Screen Biennial Award. I also co-founded the AHRC Bombay Film Colour Research Network with Ranjani Mazumdar. Most recently I have been researching the materiality of photochemical film, including the forthcoming volume, Film: An International History of a Sensitive Medium (University of Minnesota, 2027), co-edited with Alice Lovejoy and Pansy Duncan.

I received my PhD from Yale University in 2018 and was subsequently appointed a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University and a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. I’ve also spent time as a Museum Research Consortium Fellow at MoMA, and as a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2024 I was selected as a BBC New Generation Thinker, and am a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3 and 4.

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.