Books

The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity

From Victorian breakthroughs in synthesising pigments to the BBC’s conversion to chromatic broadcasting, this book reveals how new colour media (across painting, printing, photography, film, and television) revolutionized the way Britain saw itself and its Empire across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Winner: BAFTSS Best First Monograph Award, MSA First Book Prize. Shortlisted: MLA Prize for a First Book, The Kraszna-Krausz Book Award. Longlisted: Berger Prize for Art History. Commended by The Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee. Reviews in: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Oxford Art Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television , Apollo Magazine, and The Art Newspaper

(Paul Mellon Centre/Yale University Press, 2023)

Film Stock: An International History of a Sensitive Medium

Co-edited with Alice Lovejoy and Pansy Duncan

Made from animal bones, plant cellulose, and precious metals, photochemical film defined a century of cinema. Looking past Hollywood and beyond iconic companies like Eastman Kodak, Agfa, and Pathé, Film Stock travels to Argentina, India, Czechoslovakia, and other locales to offer a truly global history of the very material of film.

My chapter, titled “Celluloid Skin: Cotton, Silver, Gelatin, Porcelain and the Racial Materialities of Film” explores the raw ingredients used to make film to reveal that its supposed conflation with White skin was troubled and destabilized through its proximity to animal bodies, Black labor, black materials, and Asian commodities.

(University of Minnesota Press, 2027)

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