Presented March 2024 as part of the BAFTSS ‘Teaching Colour’ event. You can listen to the conversation with Sarah Street, Joshua Yumibe, Lida Zeitlin-Wu and Bregt Lameris here.

This event in June 2024 marked the launch of Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe’s edited collection Global Film Colour: The Monopack Revolution at Mid-Century, I spoke about my chapter ‘Mapping the Laboratory’ discussing the use of Technicolor’s dye-transfer process in a range of global cinema’s across Europe and Asia, from Indian cinema of the 1950s to Dario Argento’s Italian Giallo Suspiria (1977).

Paul Mellon Centre, London

Presented in February 2023 as part of The Paul Mellon Centre’s New Directions in Art History series, in conversation with Erica Carter. You can watch a recording of the event here.

Institut national d'histoire de l'art, Paris

This keynote was delivered at Deanthrocentric Materialism and the Politics of Matter, a conference organised by Sarah Gould in 2021. You can watch a recording of the event here.

BBC Radio3

In February 2024 I was invited onto the BBC’s Arts & Ideas Programme to discuss picnicing in The Zone of Interest and Picnic at Hanging Rock. You can listen to the conversation here.

BBC Radio 3

In November 2022 I was invited onto the BBC’s Arts & Ideas Programme to speak about the materiality of plastic and clay in conjunction with two exhibitions: Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art (Hayward Gallery) and Plastic: Remaking Our World (V&A Dundee). You can listen to the conversation here.

BBC Radio 4

You can listen to me and my cohort of New Generation Thinkers discussing our research in this May 2024 episode of the BBC’s Arts & Ideas Podcast here.

BBC Radio 4

In June 2024 I was invited to discuss escapism with Noreen Masud, Jonathan White and Jules Evans. You can listen to the conversation here.

National Gallery, London September 2023

With Hardeep S. Dhindsa I lead a tour of the galleries as part of the National Gallery’s Friday Late series in conjunction with AAH’s ‘Colour Focus’ Art History Festival. We explored how artists used the colour white to articulate ideas about White European culture, society and status, considering how the visual qualities of artworks intersect with political ideas about race.

National Portrait Gallery, September 2023

As part of the Yevonde Study Day in conjunction with the exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour I spoke about how colour threatened to feminise the work of photographers and filmmakers in the interwar years.

eikones Forum, University of Basel, May 2023

Delivered as part of the ‘Materialising Transparency’ workshop, this paper considered how celluloid and human skin were rhetorically linked in the Anglo-American imagination through their shared transparency and light sensitivity. In doing so it revealed celluloid was not merely a locus of racial representation in cinema and photography, but through its routine comparison to the surface of the human body, became a racialised material itself.

Colour Matters Conference, Oxford University, December 2023, in conjunction with the Ashmolean’s exhibition Colour Revolution, Victorian Art, Fashion and Design

This paper considers how the new colour printing technology of chromolithography changed the way racial difference materialised in British print through depictions of skin in late nineteenth century advertisements.

University of Birmingham, Department of Film and Creative Writing

14 March 2024

This paper examines the use of the Belgian colour process Gevacolor in Hindi cinema of the 1950s, focusing on Pamposh / Lotus of Kashmir (Mir, 1953), the first colour film domestically shot and processed in India. However, as this film is considered lost, I consider how we might piece together its history and significances in the face of archival absences and silences. Given the emphasis in colour film scholarship on close textual analysis, Pamposh raises questions about the methods we use to study colour film and how they privilege certain histories and technologies. Despite the significance of Pamposh as the first colour film domestically printed in Asia, the majority of its archival traces are found in European collections, notably the Gevaert archive in Antwerp. Drawing upon this archive, I focus on the figure of Miss Gevaert: the Belgian equivalent of the Kodak Girl, used to promote and sell Gevaert products across Europe and Asia. I consider how this figure brings to light questions of archival visibility and invisibility with regards to colour cinema in India.oes here