Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a Lecturer in Film and Media at UCL. Her work explores the relationship between materials, technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies across nineteenth and twentieth-century visual media. Her work on materiality has a particular focus on (porously defined) “British” contexts, but she also specialises in the global histories of colour film technologies (particularly Technicolor). Her first book The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality, and British Modernity (PMC/Yale, 2023) examines how chromatic technologies developed in Britain, from synthetic pigments to colour television, revolutionised the visual and social environments of the modern world. With Alice Lovejoy and Pansy Duncan she is also co-editing the first volume dedicated to the material history of film stock.
She received her PhD in History of Art with Film and Media Studies from Yale University in 2018, then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge University before joining the University of St Andrews as a Lecturer in Film Studies (2019-2022). Her work has been published in British Art Studies, Film History and Screen.
