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)

Articles & Chapters

  • White Hot and Agfacool: Race, Heat and Colour in The Zone of Interest

    World Picture Journal, 15, Winter 2025

  • A History of Colour Cinema That Can Account for Indian Cinema: The Bombay Film Laboratory, Kashmir’s Climate and Gevacolor’s Pamposh

    Co-authored with Poorvi Gaur, BioScope, May 2025

    Shortlisted for BAFTSS Best-Article Prize

  • Hollywood Colour: Race, Technology, Aesthetics

    Co-authored with Xin Peng, in Pamela Wojcik and Paula J. Masood (eds), The Routledge Companion to American Film History (Routledge, 2025)

  • Did Madame Mao Dream in Technicolor? Rethinking Cold War Colour Cinema through Technicolor’s “Chinese Copy”

    Co-authored with Zhaoyu Zhu, Screen 61, no. 3 (September 2020)

    Winner of the SCMS Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award, Screen Biennal Award, and Honourable Mention for BAFTSS Best Article Prize.

  • Mapping the Laboratory: Technicolor Across Asia and Europe

    in Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe eds., Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (Rutgers University Press, 2024)

  • The Texture of Capitalism: Industrial Oil Colours and the Politics of Paint in the Work of G.F. Watts

    British Art Studies, Issue 14, November 2019

  • "The Hollywood Powderpuff War": Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s

    Film History 28, no. 1 (2016): 107–31

    Highly commended for Screen’s Annette Kuhn Essay Award, Runner Up for BAFTSS Best Doctoral Student Journal Article Prize.

Everything Else