“The Wheel and The Grid: Color, Technology, and the Rise of Chromatic Capitalism”

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is Assistant Professor of Race and Media at Old Dominion University. Lida received her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from UC Berkeley. She is a media historian and theorist whose research combines archival methods with frameworks from film and media studies, science and technology studies, visual and material culture, and critical race studies. Her book project, Seeing by Numbers, tells the story of how something as subjective and ephemeral as color came to be seen as standardized. Her writing has been published in Camera Obscura, Just Tech, Frames, and elsewhere; and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2024).