About
Lida Zeitlin-Wu is a scholar of emerging media and visual culture whose research focuses on the commodification and quantification of sensory experience and personhood under global techno-capitalism. Her current book project, Seeing by Numbers, Seeing by Numbers: The Long History of Digital Color, tells the story of how something as seemingly individualized and ephemeral as color came to be so closely linked to numerical exactitude and standardization. Analyzing examples ranging from 19th-century commercial paint charts to Pantone’s Color of the Year and Adobe Photoshop, the book reframes color as an experiential category that has been consistently manipulated and calibrated through technological means—often to the benefit of corporate institutions and global structures of power. She also has a growing interest in food studies (she received a level 3 certification from the Wine and Spirits Educational Trust in 2021) and critiques of wellness culture, particularly as they intersect with race, gender, and technology.
Her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Frames Cinema Journal, Adaptation, and The Nabokov Online Journal, and Camera Obscura (forthcoming). With Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (forthcoming from the MIT press in 2024), a volume that brings together scholars working at the unexamined intersection of abstract, sensory color and color as a key component of systemic racism.
Dr. Zeitlin-Wu has designed and taught a wide range of courses, from “TV After TV” and “Digital Aesthetics” to “Film and Media Theory” and “Taste: The Senses on Screen,” a class about food media. At UC Berkeley, where she received her Ph.D. in 2022, she received both the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award and the Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. Fellowship in the Art of Teaching Writing. She has a strong investment in equitable course design and anti-racist pedagogy, which she will continue to cultivate at UM in her role as DISCO Network Curriculum Development Fellow.
