Lydia Burleson

Lydia Burleson is a PhD candidate in the Department of English with a minor in the comparative study of race and ethnicity. Her dissertation offers an intellectual history of the American Depression era that centers how representations of race and poverty evolved in response to the period’s immense social, economic, and technological change, with Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell as her two core interlocutors. At Arcade, Lydia’s work is invested in bringing academic conversations to the broader public.