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British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Colour and Film Special Interest Group. Current events, calls and announcements for work on colour, film, tv, screen studies and cultures by and beyond the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG. Bluesky: @baftsscolorfilmsig.bsky.social (X/Twitter)@BAFTSSColorFilm Contact: BAFTSS Colour & Film SIG Convenors

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CFP BAFTSS Annual Conference 15 – 17 April 2026, Bournemouth. Keynote Speaker: Professor Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths). The BAFTSS Conference for 2026 has set an Open Call for individual abstracts or pre-constituted panels on any topic in any disciplinary or methodological framing. BAFTSS welcomes submissions for:

• Individual research presentations (15mins)
• Roundtables and pre-constituted panels of 3-4 submissions. We especially encourage pre-constituted panels that mix methodologies and approaches (e.g., creative practice research alongside more traditional conference papers)
• Creative practice research concerned with film and / or TV
• Audio-visual scholarship in any format
• PGR Research Posters for the BAFTSS Annual PGR Research Poster Showcase

BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG Official Panel: If you would like to convene the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG’s Official Panel for the BAFTSS Annual Conference 2026, then please get in touch (liz.i.watkins@gmail.com, sarah.street@bristol.ac.uk and vicky.jackson@bristol.ac.uk) ahead of the BAFTSS conference deadline which is 5th December 2025.

Final deadline for submission of proposals to the BAFTSS 2026 Conference: 5th December 2025 (outcome notified January 2026)

All attendees at the BAFTSS 2026 conference must be members of BAFTSS at the time of the conference.

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Call for submissions for the BAFTSS Awards and the Postgraduate Research Poster Showcase: 

BAFTSS 2026 Publication Awards deadline: Friday 5th December 2025:  https://www.baftss.org/publication-submission-2026.html

BAFTSS 2026 Practice Research Awards deadline: Friday 5th December 2025:  https://www.baftss.org/practice-submission-2026.html

BAFTSS 2026 PGR Poster Showcase deadline: 31st January 2026:  https://www.baftss.org/pgr-poster-submission-2026.html 

All participants in the BAFTSS Awards and PGR Poster Showcase must be members of BAFTSS 

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Book Launch & Seminar: Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT, 2025) was held on Thursday 30^th October 2025. Color Protocols asks ‘What is at stake when categories like color, race, and ethnicity are transformed into a common language, lexicon, or industry standard?’ The book responds to this question by examining the ways in which color is central to the history of systemic racism, and in turn, that the encoding of race vis-à-vis color is an intrinsic aspect of chromatic technologies. View a recording of the event online.

Speakers’ Bio notes:

Lida Zeitlin-Wu Assistant Professor / ACLS Fellow, University of Notre Dame Lida Zeitlin-Wu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and a 2025 ACLS Fellow. An interdisciplinary historian and theorist of media and culture, her research explores the commodification and rationalization of sensory experience and selfhood—particularly with regards to color—under technocapitalism. She is currently completing a book monograph titled How Color Became a Technology: The Making of Chromatic Capitalism.

Carolyn L. Kane Professor of Visual Communication, Toronto Metropolitan University Carolyn L. Kane is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press / Random House, 2025) with Lida Zeitlin-Wu and author of Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light (University of California Press, 2023); High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure (University of California Press, 2019); and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University (2011) and was awarded the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellow in “Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty” at Brown University in 2014-2015. She served on the Faculty of the Film and Media Department at Hunter College in the City University of New York (2011-2014) and is curently Professor of Visual Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Aileen Robinson, Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Stanford University Aileen Robinson received an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama from Northwestern University and her A.B. in Literature from Harvard University. She conducted archival research in Britain and the United States supported through an SSRC International Dissertation Fellowship and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. She served as a Mellon Fellow in the Scholars in the Humanities program for 2016-2018 at Stanford University. Read more

Amber Sweat, Assistant Professor of French, Amherst College I am a scholar of the Black Francophone world with a marked interest in youth and new media studies. My work takes up literature, film, and new media from the Franco-Caribbean, Francophone sub-Saharan Africa, and the Black diaspora into spaces such as the Parisian and Marseillaise banlieue. Largely, I am more concerned with the connective tissue of racial identity as opposed to national or regional designations, but I do consider the lines drawn in Black national and cultural identities, especially as they are concerned with artistic and literary practices. I also pays attention to the tricky (un)translatability of categories such as Black. Adole (sense), set to become my first monograph, examines moments from media that I consider emblematic of the screen age: those screens include the Photomaton, phone selfies, augmented reality filters, and elements of texts-as-screen. Publications include “Space to Breathe.” Qui Parle 33, 1 (2024) and “‘Mise(ère)-en-scène’: Transposition and the Child in Hugo’s and Ly’s ‘Les misérables.’” L’Esprit créateur 63.3 (2023): 67–79.  Read more

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CFP BAFTSS Annual Conference 15 – 17 April 2026, Bournemouth. Keynote Speaker: Professor Julian Henriques (Goldsmiths). The BAFTSS Conference for 2026 has set an Open Call for individual abstracts or pre-constituted panels on any topic in any disciplinary or methodological framing. BAFTSS welcomes submissions for:

• Individual research presentations (15mins)
• Roundtables and pre-constituted panels of 3-4 submissions. We especially encourage pre-constituted panels that mix methodologies and approaches (e.g., creative practice research alongside more traditional conference papers)
• Creative practice research concerned with film and / or TV
• Audio-visual scholarship in any format
• PGR Research Posters for the BAFTSS Annual PGR Research Poster Showcase

BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG Official Panel: If you would like to convene the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG’s Official Panel for the BAFTSS Annual Conference 2026, then please get in touch (liz.i.watkins@gmail.com, sarah.street@bristol.ac.uk and vicky.jackson@bristol.ac.uk) ahead of the BAFTSS conference deadline which is 5th December 2025.

Final deadline for submission of proposals to the BAFTSS 2026 Conference: 5th December 2025 (outcome notified by January 2026). Enquiries about BAFTSS 2026 Conference: BAFTSS2026@gmail.com  

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Film Atlas. An interactive guide to every motion picture film format, soundtrack, 3-D and color process ever invented (open access) edited by James Layton was launched in May 2025. The Film Atlas is a collaboration between the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the George Eastman Museum. The Film Atlas includes entries (essays, film fragments, bibliographies, technical information) on black-and-white and colour film stocks (e.g. Anscochrome, Three-color Technicolor, Eastman Color (1949-1982)), pre-coloured film stocks (eg. Sonochrome), and applied colour techniques (e.g. hand-colouring, tinting, toning, tinting and toning (combined)), and their uses. There is a piece on Luke McKernan’s blog, titled ‘Every Format, Everywhere, All At Once’, which is about the Film Atlas. An amazing resource.

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Watch the recording of the book launch & seminar for Bregt Lameris’ Feeling Colour, Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s (Open Book Publishers, 2025)

The book is open access and can read here  https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0380 

Speakers included Bregt Lameris (Open Universiteit, NL) in discussion with Lucy Fife Donaldson (University of St. Andrews) and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University). Colour has played an oft-fraught role in the relationship between cinema and its audiences. Lameris’ book Feeling Colour explores interdisciplinary perspectives on the different ways colour creates—or was believed to create—embodied reactions.  The author, Bregt Lameris, is Senior Lecturer, Department of Digital Culture Innovation and Communication, Open Universiteit, NL. Bregt Lameris works as a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the Open Universiteit (Heerlen), where she develops courses on for example the digital transition and the experience of cultural heritage, stigma in media, clothes and identity, disability studies and culture.

Respondents were Lucy Fife Donaldson and Joshua Yumibe.

Lucy Fife Donaldson is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Texture in film (Palgrave, 2014), co-editor (with James Walters) of Television performance (Red Globe Press, 2019), general editor (with Sarah Cardwell and Jonathan Bignell) of Manchester University Press’ ‘The Television Series’, and an editor of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. Her award-winning audiovisual essay work has been published in leading videographic journals and screened at international festivals.

Joshua Yumibe is professor of film studies at Michigan State University. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen, and most recently of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (Columbia University Press, 2019) with Sarah Street. Street and Yumibe have also recently co-edited Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (Rutgers, 2024). Yumibe is also an editor of Screen and of the Contemporary Film Directors at the University of Illinois Press.

The event was organised by the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG.

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CONFERENCE REGISTRATION OPEN: 25th – 28th May 2025 sees the annual EYE International Conference, which this year is on The Colour Fantastic Revisited: Across Global Histories, Theories, Aesthetics, Archives. The conference was organised by the EYE Film Museum,  University of Amsterdam, University of Utrecht, and Colour in Film (Colour Group GB with HTW Berlin). Full programme

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Kirsten Moana Thompson’s report from the Eighth International Conference, Colour in Film: TV, Video and Film is online. The conference took place 10-13 November 2024 at the Watershed, Bristol, UK. The conference was co-organised by Colour Group of Great Britain and HTW – University of Applied Sciences, Berlin – in collaboration with South West Silents. The conference focused on colour in the context of history, aesthetics and technology in television, video, and electronic displays. There were also sessions on historical film colours in different gauges and formats, from the silent days to the modern era including in natural history film. Read the Full Report Here

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The BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG Research Seminar Programme 2023-2024: This series of online seminars brings together researchers who are working on colour and film. Each seminar focuses on a different aspect of colour and film research.

SESSION THREE: GLOBAL FILM COLOR , THE MONOPACK REVOLUTION AT MIDCENTURY (Rutgers University Press, 2024) BOOK LAUNCH Thursday 13th June 2024.

A recording of the Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury event can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/sK9oHMcpFbo

Thanks to editors Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol) and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University), and contributing authors William Carroll (University of Alberta), Josephine Diecke (University of Zurich), Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London), Ranjani Mazumdar (Jawaharlal Nehru University). for joining the discussion. The presentations and chapters include neon lights in Japanese cinema, the labour of colour film production tracked through laboratory communications, work with Technicolor and Agfacolor in India, China and more.

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SESSION TWO: TEACHING COLOUR 21st  March 2024. This session brought together five scholars to discuss case studies and approaches to teaching colour and film. Speakers include Professor Josh Yumibe (Michigan State University), Dr Bregt Lameris (Open Universiteit, Netherlands), Professor Sarah Street  (University of Bristol), Dr Lida Zeitlin-Wu (University of Michigan) and Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London).

A recording of the session can be viewed here:

Professor Joshua Yumibe, Professor of Film, Michigan State University on ‘Teaching Colour as Race and Hue in a Global Context.’ The presentation will focus on Daughters of the Dust, which Joshua Yumibe taught at the University of Turin in Italy in 2022. Read more.

Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson (University College London) will speak about “De-centering Film History Through Colour.” Read more.

Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol) will discuss ‘How to include practice in teaching colour: What are the challenges? What is gained through practical application (e.g. short films; video essays) of ideas and concepts taught more broadly on a module?’ Read more.

Dr Lida Zeitlin-Wu (University of Michigan) will discuss “Color, Race, and Technology in the Digital Studies Classroom.” Lida Zeitlin-Wu will talk about the class that she has taught for the past two years at the University of Michigan called “From Prisms to Pantone: Color, Race, and Technology,” which is an upper-division elective cross-listed between Digital Studies, Film, TV, and Radio, Architecture, and American Studies. Read more

Dr Bregt Lameris (Open Universiteit, Netherlands). ‘Teaching Colour and the Materiality of Film.’ Bregt Lameris will elaborate on teaching the history of colour film through experimental media-archaeology, based on her experiences with a tinting and toning workshop for film students from the Zurich University at the Lichtspiel/Kinemathek in Bern. Read more

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BAFTSS SIGS Newsletter Issue 9 (2023): The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Research Network consists of 24 Special Interest Groups. Each SIG focuses on a different subject area, which include Adaptations, Media and the Environment, French and Francophone Screen Studies, Animation, and Documentary studies. The full list of BAFTSS SIGS and contact details for their convenors are on the BAFTSS SIGS webpages. This Newsletter includes CFPs for BAFTSS Conference 2024, the peer reviewed journal Open Screens, and links to symposia and workshops that have been organised by BAFTSS SIGS.  Recent BAFTSS SIG events include the Amateur Cinema and Archives and Archival Methods SIGS’ ‘Back into Focus: How to Make Women Filmmakers More Visible in the Archives’ workshop; work in progress seminars hosted by the Performance and Stardom SIG and LGBTQIA+ Screen Studies, and the Colour and Film Research Seminar on Colourisation. Questions to BAFTSS SIGS Research Network Coordinator Dr Liz Watkins e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk

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The first of the 2023-24 Colour and Film SIG research Seminars was on Colourisation. The seminar, which was held on Thursday 9th November 2023, discussed the ethics and aesthetic complexities of the digitisation and addition of colour to films that were initially made and circulated in black-and-white formats. The session was convened by Dr Liz Watkins (University of Leeds) with Dr Vicky Jackson (University of Bristol) and chaired by Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol). Thanks to our brilliant speakers for a series of fascinating presentations:

– Dr Dominic Williams (Northumbria University) ‘Auschwitz Colourised: Challenging the Perpetrator’s Gaze?’

– Dr Libby Saxton (Queen Mary University of London) ‘Colouring the In/Human: Movement and Stillness in Auschwitz Untold’

– Kamilla Simor (University of Pécs, Hungary) ‘Reconfiguration of the Past: The Spanish Civil War in Colour.’

– Dr Liz Watkins  (University of Leeds) ‘Colourisation, Ethics and the Archive: Digitally Imaging the Wounded Body.’

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The BAFTSS Colour, Film, Research Seminar Series 2023 were organised by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Special Interest Group on Colour and Film. Each of the seminars offers a series of perspectives on new research in colour, film, television and the archive.

The Spring- Summer 2023 seminar series culminated on 22nd June 2023 with an online book launch for two new publications on colour: Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol’s William Burges’s Great Book Case and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023) and Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson’s The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (Paul Mellon Centre, 2023). Thanks to all who attended and to Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Professor Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University) and Dr Liz Watkins (University of Leeds) for joining the discussion.

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BAFTSS SIGS Newsletter June 2023 Issue 8: The BAFTSS SIGS are a network of 24 research groups, each of which focuses on a specific subject area. The network includes Special Interest Groups on Transnational Screens, Animation, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Amateur Cinema, British Cinema and Television, German Screen Studies, and a new Media and the Environment SIG. See the BAFTSS SIGS webpages. Read more

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Thanks to the brilliant researchers who presented their work and everyone who joined us at the second Colour, Film, Research Seminar 16:00-17:30 (BST) online Thursday 15^th June 2023: The seminar brought together five researchers who are working on different aspects of colour, film, television and the archive. The short-form presentations were followed by a Q&A.

Speakers included session chair: Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol).

Dr Jan Faull, Royal Geographical Society/ Royal Holloway University: ‘Reassessing John Noel’s role in photographs and film of the Everest expedition “beyond the affair of the dancing lamas”’ 

Cathy Lomax, Queen Mary University of London: ‘”Blue is a problem”: coloured eyeshadow in films of the 1950s and 1960s‘

Vicky Jackson, University of Bristol: ‘Coronation Street, Colour and World Building’

Liz Watkins, University of Leeds: ‘Eliot Elisofon, ‘heightened reality’, and ‘color control’ across photojournalism and Technicolor Design.’

Kirsten Moana Thompson, Seattle University. “The Doors of Perception: Hallucinatory Animation, Disney and Color”

Top left: Exploring Elisofon’s influence as Special Color Consultant for Moulin Rouge (John Huston, 1952) and Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). Top right: Jan Faull’s presentation on Captain John Noel and colour pictures, through Tibet to Everest. Lower left: Hilda’s Mural. Coronation Street. Episode 1617, 14 July 1976. Directed by Bill Gilmour. Granada Television. Middle right: Collage by Cathy Lomax for ‘”Blue is a problem”: coloured eyeshadow in films of the 1950s and 1960s.’ Lower right: for Kirsten Moana Thompson’s research on “”The Doors of Perception: Hallucinatory Animation, Disney and Color”.

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Thanks to the speakers who took part and everyone who attended the first of the BAFTSS Colour, Film, Research Seminars of 2023 .

The seminar series offered a series of snapshots. Each focussed new aspects of research in colour and film. Each presentation was 10 minutes long and followed by a Q&A. Together the researchers brought together an exciting combination of interests in colour, film and the archive.

The programme for the first seminar, which took place on the 9th March 2023, is copied below.

Colour, Film, Research Seminar 1.

Session chair: Dr Liz Watkins, University of Leeds.

Zoe Viney Burgess, PGR. University of Southampton ‘Colour Stories from the Archive. 9.5mm film.’

Professor Sarah Street, University of Bristol. ‘British Film Criticism and Global Colour’ based on her chapter from the forthcoming book Global color cinema: the Monopack revolution at Mid-century, eds. Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe (Rutgers University Press, 2023)

Professor Jeffrey Geiger, University of Essex. ‘Dislocating the Travelogue: Adelaide Pearson and Amateur Colour Expression’

Dr Kristian Moen, University of Bristol. ‘Colour, Disney and Animation’

Followed by Q&A.

For further information contact: Liz Watkins e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk

The event has been organised by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Special Interest Group on Colour and Film. The SIG Convenors are Professor Sarah Street (Bristol), Dr Liz Watkins (Leeds), Dr Vicky Jackson (Bristol).

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BAFTSS SIGS Newsletter issue7 (October 2022) is now online. The BAFTSS SIGS form a network of 23 research groups, which cover subject areas including Stardom and Performance Studies, Transnational Film and Television, Archives and Archival Methods, Essay Films, East Asian Screen Cultures and as from this month, a new Adaptations SIG.

This BAFTSS SIGS Newsletter includes links to funding opportunities, CFPs, Reading Groups (online), the LGBTQIA + Screen Studies SIG’s new Richard Dyer Student Essay Writing Prize, the Colour Across Chinese Cinemas: Pan Si Dong Screening which is sponsored by the Colour and Film SIG, a 9.5mm Film resource, which has emerged from ’The Little Apparatus’ 100 years of 9.5mm Film Conference convened by the brilliant Zoë Viney Burgess at the University of Southampton (online), and the programme for the Philosophical Thinking and the Films of Kelly Reichardt Symposium, which will be held at Queen Mary University of London (5th November 2022). 

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Invitation: the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG welcomes new submissions from guest contributors and BAFTSS members for the Notes on Colour blog.

Contact: SIG convenors vicky.jackson@bristol.ac.uk and/or e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk

We welcome blogs (500- 2000 words) on recent research in colour, film, TV and screen media, archival methodologies, conference reports, exhibition/ film/ book reviews and more.

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BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG on Twitter follow us @BAFTSSColorFilm

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BAFTSS Special Interest Groups Newsletter issue 5 (November 2021) is now online. The SIGs are the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) network of twenty research groups. Details of SIG activities, CFPs, and funding opportunities can be found in the newsletter.

For further information or to join BAFTSS or get in touch

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