Lida Zeitlin-Wu is a media historian and theorist who teaches in the Media Studies program and the interdisciplinary MA in the Humanities. Originally trained in modern languages, she now researches the rationalization and commodification of sensory experienceparticularly colorfrom the late 19th century to the present. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley in 2022, and from 2022-2024 was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Studies Institute at the University of Michigan. She is working on a book titled How Color Became a Technology: The Making of Chromatic Capitalism, and she recently finished two collaborative projects: 1. Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media, an edited volume with Carolyn L. Kane (forthcoming from MIT Press in 2025), and 2. Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, an experimental collectively authored monograph with the research collective the DISCO Network (forthcoming from Stanford University Press in 2025).
Ph.D. in Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, (2022)
M.A. in Film & Media, University of California, Berkeley, (2018)
M.A. in Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, (2017)
B.A. in Slavic Languages & Literatures / Visual Art, The University of Chicago, (2014)
Research Interests
Media history and theory, color, digital media, science and technology studies, critical race studies, visual culture, critiques of wellness, food studies and transnational approaches to taste and flavor
Articles
- Zeitlin-Wu, L. (2023). What's Your Color? Mood Conditioning the Postwar Domestic Interior. Camera Obscura 38 (3) , pp. 35-75.
- Zeitlin-Wu, L. (2023). Meditation Apps and the Unbearable Whiteness of Wellness. Just Tech. Social Science Research Council.
- Zeitlin-Wu, L. (2020). Fabricating Images at the Color Factory. Frames Cinema Journal 17 ("The Politics of Colour Media").
- Zeitlin-Wu, L. (2018). Nabokov's Optical Paintbox: Color in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The Nabokov Online Journal X11.
- Zeitlin-Wu, L. (2016). Transmedia Adaptation, or the Kinesthetics of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 9 (3) , pp. 417-427.
Books
- (2025). Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal. Stanford University Press "Sensing Media" series.