Beth Pyner

(she/her)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

Research interests include:

• Gender and feminist studies
• Visual culture studies including photography, film, illustration, and gallery exhibition.
• Critical race theory
• Women's life writing
• Contemporary literature

Thesis

Intermediality and/as Encounter: a Feminist Approach to Women's Contemporary, Intermedial Memoirs

Interdisciplinary in scope and intersectionally feminist in approach, my doctoral research argues for the reappraisal of intermediality (the integration of different forms of media) as a series of encounters between media. I examine the intermedial representation of encounters between and among women and girls, across a contemporary and transnational archive of women's intermedial memoirs set against backdrops of conflict and migration: the combination of prose and photography in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood; the fusing of word, illustration, photography, and archive materials in Nora Krug's graphic memoir Heimat: A German Family Album; the epistolic film in Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts' For Sama; and the integration of archival and reconstructed photography and film in the gallery space, alongside material evidence of these elements' production in Diana Markosian's art installation Santa Barbara. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how, when faced with intermedial forms, we also encounter intermediality, as we become part of the intermedial encounters that we consume. By engaging with the multiple forms of encounter in these memoirs, I model a pathbreaking, intersectionally feminist, and self-reflexive method for "reading" intermediality.

An essay derived from this project has been published in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

Funding sources

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

Biography

I completed my BA in Hispanic Studies with European Studies at Queen Mary, University of London (2012), and my MA in Comparative Literature at Kings College London (2014). After graduating from my master's, I spent several years working in the charity sector and in arts education, including within higher education, where I worked as a project coordinator overseeing EU-funded widening participation initiatives in the visual arts. I commenced my PhD in 2019 and am funded by the AHRC via the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.

During my PhD I have taught widely across English Literature modules at multiple levels. My experience includes leading first-year undergraduate seminars, participating in round-table discussions followed by a Q&A for a second-year module, and covering a final-year lecture and seminars.

I am currently in the process of developing a postdoctoral project relating to the potentialities of the afterlives of photographic materials and archives, particularly as they exceed and scatter the hierarchies imbued in their original contexts.

Honours and awards

Research fellowships and grants

• AHRC research support grant covering travel to New York, USA to interview artist Diana Markosian, 2023
• AHRC research support grant covering travel to Seattle, USA for the annual conference of the Association of the Study of the Arts of the Present, 2023
• AHRC research support grant covering travel to undertake research at Fotografiska, Stockholm, 2023
• AHRC research training support grant covering travel to the TV PhD Talent Scheme in Edinburgh, UK, 2022
• AHRC research training support grant to undertake a documentary film course at UCL, London, 2021
• AHRC doctoral studentship, 2020

Teaching awards and training

• AFHEA certification awarded in 2023

Other awards

• Nominated for Feminist Media Studies' Graduate Student Writing Prize. Award announced in 2025.
• Nominated for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Graduate Student Essay Prize for the best graduate student conference paper at ASAP/14, Seattle, WA, 2023. Award announced in October 2024.
• I won a full bursary to attend Bristol Translates Summer School 2024 at the University of Bristol to support my literary translation work from Spanish to English. Bristol Translates offers the opportunity to work with leading professional translators to translate texts across different literary genres, and to receive training relating to all aspects of professional literary translation.
• I was one of 15 delegates selected for the 2022 TV PhD talent scheme run by Edinburgh TV Festival and the TV Foundation in collaboration with the AHRC. I was one of six finalists to pitch an idea for a TV documentary based on my PhD research at Edinburgh TV Festival, 2022. I currently have a TV documentary, based on this pitch, under development with Lion TV.
• I was selected as a New Voice by the Association for Art History and presented my research at their annual PGR conference in November 2019.

Professional memberships

• Member of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
• Member of British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies
• Member of the Modern Language Association
• Member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Academic positions

• 2020-2023: Postgraduate tutor, English Literature, Cardiff University. I led multiple seminar groups through 'Ways of Reading,' a introduction to literary theory module (first year undergraduate). I also contributed to 'Object Women in Literature and Film' (second year undergraduate), and have covered a lecture and seminars in 'Representing Race in Contemporary America' (third year undergraduate).

Other experience:

• 2022-2023: Research Assistant to Dr Alix Beeston (Cardiff University). Procuring and organising image permissions and files for some 95 images.
• 2022: Impact and Event Assistant for Unfinished: Women Filmmakers in Progress: a film festival curated by Dr Alix Beeston (Cardiff University) and Dr Stefan Solomon (Macquarie University), Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.
• 2020-2022: Co-chair of Intersec+ions, an interdisciplinary, student-led research network exploring the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other markers of difference in culture and society, Cardiff University.
• 2018-2020: Project Coordinator - Skills and Outreach, Arts University Plymouth. Coordinating and overseeing EU funded projects focused on widening participations at university level in the arts.

Speaking engagements

Conference Papers

• 'Unstable Fragments of Excess: Intermedial Fugitivity in Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts' For Sama,' ASAP/14. Annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Seattle, USA. 4-7 October 2023.
• 'Postmemory and the Triadic Encounter between Women in Nora Krug's Heimat: A German Family Album,' ENCAPsulate. Annual postgraduate conference in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. 15-16 June 2022.
• 'Reading the Gaps: Black (In)Visibility and Intermediality in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood,' at Rewriting War and Pear in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Contemporary British and American Literature. Conference of the Rewriting War: The Paradigms of Contemporary War Fiction in English research group, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (online). 8-9 September 2021.
• 'Broken Bodies, Fractured Forms: Intermediality and the Racial Other in Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood.' Annual conference of the Memory Studies Association, University of Warsaw (online). 5-9 July 2021.
• 'Conflict, Gender, Race, and Intermediality: An Interdisciplinary Approach,' at War and Culture Studies - What Next? Conference of the Journal of War and Culture Studies (online). 18 July 2021.
• 'Intermediality: Reimagining Gender, Race, and Conflict,' ENCAPsulate. Annual postgraduate conference in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University (online). 9-10 June 2020.
• 'Writing with Photographs: Reading the Gap betweeen Word and Image in Alexandra Fuller's War Memoirs,' at New Voices: Art and Text. Annual postgraduate conference of the Association for Art History, University of Nottingham. 6 November 2019.

Supervisors

Alix Beeston

Reader in Literature and Visual Culture