Lydia Burleson

Lydia Burleson is a PhD candidate in the English Department at Stanford University where she interrogates racial and economic identity formation in American media. More broadly, her work interrogates what it means to be representable, and she is especially interested in moments where representation and lived experience diverge. 

Lydia's dissertation project offers an intellectual history of the American Depression era that centers the entanglement between modern racialization and labor extraction methods amidst a radically evolving economic, technological, and publishing landscape. 

Lydia is originally from rural Texas and is one of the first people in her family to go to college and graduate school. For more on Lydia's recent work and how her experience growing up in poverty shapes her scholarship, see lydiaburleson.com.