Lydia Burleson

Open Access Scholarship with Arcade and the Stanford Humanities Center

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, Arcade is a place for readers and writers interested in the humanities and the world. We publish a broad range of exciting research and reflection, from the accessible to the esoteric, across languages, historical periods, and generations. All of our features are intended to be best of their kind: curated

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Podcast: Historians and Their Histories with MA Historical Society

In this episode of Historians & Their Histories, we speak with Lydia Burleson. She discusses her research into the Massachusetts state seal, tracing how its Indigenous imagery has persisted and shifted since the colony’s 1629 charter. Drawing upon variety of archival records, Lydia focuses on the seal’s brief disappearance during the Revolutionary period, when it was

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Interview: Shelley Fisher Fishkin on her book Jim

 In 2025, as part of its “Black Lives” series, Yale University Press published Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s biography of Jim, the literary character from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A renowned scholar of race and widely regarded as the seminal expert on Twain, Fishkin recently spoke with Stanford English graduate student Lydia Burleson about the process of writing the

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Using Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Half-Time Show to Teach Narrative Theory

Burleson details the way she and her undergraduate narrative theory class performed a narrative analysis, along with a media and cultural studies analysis, of Lamar’s half-time performance at the 59th Super Bowl. https://shc.stanford.edu/arcade/interventions/using-kendrick-lamars-super-bowl-half-time-show-teach-narrative-theory

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Public Convo: Anthony Abraham Jack

When given the opportunity to interview sociology scholar, higher education expert, Anthony Abraham Jack, author of The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students, Lydia jumped at the chance. Sitting down with Tony in November 2023, Lydia asked Tony about how he envisioned the future of higher education post-affirmative action and how he imagined

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Op Ed: Celebrating Impoverished Joy

The U.S. Census Bureau recently announced its 2022 poverty statistics. According to The New York Times, poverty in America had seen its highest annual increase on record. By the bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, one in eight Americans doesn’t have enough money to pay rent, to buy groceries, to survive, let alone live. One in eight Americans. Nearly forty

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