Dr Alix Beeston
(she/her)

BA Dist, Hons First Class, PhD (Sydney)

: Available for postgraduate supervision

Teams and roles for Alix Beeston

Reader in Literature and Visual Culture
School of Global Humanities

My work advances feminist approaches to literature, film, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also experimenting with new modes of scholarly writing and dissemination. Interested in allusive and underappreciated textual forms, I seek to revalue negative phenomena such as absence or silence, as well as literary and visual objects that are seen as marginal, riven with gaps and flaws, or confounding in their effects.

I am the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Image Encounters, a new critical–creative book forthcoming in 2027 from Penn State University Press. Composed of interlinked microessays that attend to images of women and girls from across photography history, Image Encounters argues that photography's feminist potential emerges from its functions as a medium of encounter.

I am also a leading expert in women's unfinished creative labour across mediums. The first major publication of my work in this area is my co-edited volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023), which won awards for Best Edited Collection from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.

In 2026, I developed an occasional series for The Paris Review that features women's unfinished literary works introduced by scholars. The series opens with an excerpt from a little-known unfinished novel by the Black American writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins. I identified and edited this draft material as part of my contribution to a recovery project connected to Collins, which also includes my co-editing of Women, Sisters and Friends, a volume of her plays and screenplays that will be published by the University of California Press in March 2027, and my editing of her second unfinished novel Lollie, slated for release by Hagfish in 2028.

I am the founder and editor of the Visualities forum at Modernism/modernity Print+ and a host on the New Books Network. I have published scholarly articles in journals such as ASAP/Journal, Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Histories, PMLA, and Signs, and public-facing criticism in Public Books, Senses of Cinema, Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere. I am honoured to have received the 2024 Dillwyn Medal for Outstanding Early Career Research in Humanities and Creative Arts from the Learned Society of Wales.

Upcoming events:

Featured writer, Composition as Celebration: An Inventory of Gertrude Stein, online event in connection with The Worlds of Gertrude Stein, curated by Sophie Oliver at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 14 October 2026
Guest Lecture, "To Touch a Past That Burns: Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) and the Speculative Rehearsals of Feminist Historiography," Film & Screen Research Seminar, University of Cambridge, 11 November 2026
Leader, Facing Images: A Ffasiwn Creative Writing Workshop, National Museum Cardiff, 25 November 2026
Curator and presenter (with Carlo Cenciarelli and Meena Saverimuttu), Incomplete Evidence, film festival at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 5–6 December 2026

Recent and forthcoming publications:

Interviews with Karen Redrobe, Jiří Anger, Mark Goble, Jonathan P. Eburne, Sarah Dowling, Suzanne Bost, Aurore Spiers, Melodrama as Provocateur editors, and Rosie Findlay, New Books Network
“Images Dreamed from the Inside: The Ethics of Encounter in Feminist Photography Studies,” Feminist Media Histories
"Unfinished: On Kathleen Collins' 'Blue Obstacles,'" The Paris Review
“Kathleen Collins’s ‘Blue Obstacles’: Scenes from an Unfinished Novel,” ASAP/Journal
"De onaffe film als feministische mogelijkheid [The unfinished film as a feminist possibility]," interviewed alongside Stefan Solomon by Joke D'Heer, Rekto:Verso
"Nella Larsen's Faces," Journal of World Literature
"Model Magic: On Clémentine Schneidermann and Charlotte James’ It’s Called Ffasiwn," CELF Cynfas
"Observe a Ruined Form," review of Giada Scodellaro's Ruins, Child, forthcoming in Sydney Review of Books, Fall 2026
With Hayley O'Malley and Samantha N. Sheppard, ed., Women, Sisters and Friends: Selected Plays and Screenplays of Kathleen Collins, forthcoming from the University of California Press, March 2027
Image Encounters, forthcoming from Penn State University Press, Fall 2027
“To Touch a Past That Burns: The Speculative Rehearsals of Feminist Historiography”, forthcoming in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, Fall 2027

Date
Type

2023

Beeston, A. 2023. A history of shapes. In: Menzies-Pike, C. ed. Critic Swallows Book: Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books. Sydney: Giramondo. , pp.292-307.
Beeston, A. and Solomon, S. eds. 2023. Incomplete: The feminist possibilities of the unfinished film. Feminist Media Histories Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Beeston, A. 2023. Kathleen Collins...posthumously. In: Beeston, A. and Solomon, S. eds. Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film. Feminist Media Histories Los Angeles: University of California Press. , pp.245-269.
Beeston, A. and Solomon, S. 2023. Pathways to the feminist incomplete: An introduction, a theory, a manifesto. In: Beeston, A. and Solomon, S. eds. Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film. Feminist Media Histories Los Angeles: University of California Press. , pp.1-38.

2022

Beeston, A. 2022. An untimely cinema: Mariam Ghani's what we left unfinished. Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture
Beeston, A. et al. 2022. Unfinished: Women filmmakers in process (catalogue). Cardiff: Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture(https://issuu.com/imageworkscardiff/docs/unfinished)
Beeston, A. 2022. Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the maternal line of sight. In: Goody, A. and Whittington, I. eds. Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. , pp.155-174.
Beeston, A. 2022. Blur. Modernism/modernity Print Plus 7 (1)

2021

Beeston, A. 2021. Girl head: feminism and film materiality by Genevieve Yue [Book Review]. JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61 (1), pp.193-198. (10.1353/cj.2021.0081)
Beeston, A. 2021. A history of shapes. Book review of "No Document" by Anwen Crawford (2021). Sydney Review of Books

2020

Beeston, A. 2020. A ghost with a camera. Post45
Beeston, A. 2020. Fingers stained with fruit and ink. Rev. of Ellena Savage, Blueberries (Text Publishing/Scribe, 2020). [Online].Sydney: Writing and Society Research Centre. Available at: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/ellena-savage-blueberries/.
Beeston, A. 2020. The Watch-bitch now: Reassessing the natural woman in Han Kang's The Vegetarian and Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45 (3), pp.679-702. (10.1086/706472)
Beeston, A. , Kingston-Reese, A. and Kindey, C. 2020. On Instagram: an intimate, immediate conversation. ASAP/J

2019

Beeston, A. 2019. Working the trap. Introduction to Special Conference Cluster, Modernist #MeToo and the working woman. Feminist Modernist Studies 2 (3), pp.304-313. (10.1080/24692921.2019.1668184)
Beeston, A. 2019. Looking like a modernist. Modernism/modernity Print Plus 4 (2)
Beeston, A. 2019. The sound of loss. Docalogue
Dowling, S. et al., 2019. Opening the book, part II. [Online].Modernism/modernity Print Plus. Available at: https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/opening-book-part-ii.
Beeston, A. 2019. Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film by Louise Hornby [Book Review]. Modernism/modernity 26 (1), pp.219-222. (10.1353/mod.2019.0010)

2018

Beeston, A. 2018. From early photography to the Instagram age. [Online].Oxford: Oxford University Press Blog. Available at: https://blog.oup.com/2018/04/women-early-photography-instagram/.
Beeston, A. 2018. The Rock on top: From King Kong to Dwayne Johnson's Skyscraper. [Online].Los Angeles Review of Books. Available at: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/rock-top-king-kong-dwayne-johnsons-skyscraper/.
Beeston, A. 2018. Object women: A history of women in photography. [Online].Instagram. Available at: http://www.instagram.com/objectwomen.
Beeston, A. 2018. Object women: looking again at women in photography. Wales Arts Review
Beeston, A. 2018. Looking again at women in photography. [Online].George Eastman Museum. Available at: https://www.eastman.org/looking-again-women-photography.
Beeston, A. 2018. In and out of sight: Modernist writing and the photographic unseen. Modernist Literature and Culture Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

2017

Beeston, A. 2017. Icons of depression. Arizona Quarterly 73 (2), pp.1-36. (10.1353/arq.2017.0007)
Beeston, A. 2017. Images in crisis: Three Lives's vanishing women. Modernism/modernity 2 (2)(10.26597/mod.0006)

2016

Beeston, A. 2016. A "leg show dance" in a skyscraper: The sequenced mechanics of John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer. PMLA 131 (3), pp.636-651. (10.1632/pmla.2016.131.3.636)

2015

Beeston, A. 2015. What do we love when we love books by dead authors?. The Conversation Australia 2015 (July 2)

Image Encounters (2027)

In Autumn 2027, I will publish Image Encounters, a richly illustrated, creative–critical account of women and girls in photography, with Penn State University Press. Composed of interlinked critical–creative microessays that contemplate specific images from across photography’s histories, Image Encounters embraces what it theorises, namely, the photograph as an object that entangles, a site of encounter: of self and other, viewer and viewed; of past and present, here and elsewhere; of thought and feeling, observation and imagination. In these image encounters, I argue, there is a feminist potential which may turn seeing and being seen into a transgressive, liberatory art.

I published a short excerpt from this manuscript at the Visualities forum of Modernism/modernity Print Plus, as well as a methodological reflection in Feminist Media Histories. Image Encounters originated in a 2018 digital project on Instagram called Object Women: A History of Women in Photography, presented in partnership with the George Eastman Museum. I introduced Object Women here, published another article about the project on the Oxford University Press blog, and made some reflections on it in a feature on contemporary art and Instagram at ASAP/J.

Women, Sisters and Friends (2027)

Women, Sisters and Friends: Selected Plays and Screenplays of Kathleen Collins will be published by the University of California Press in Spring 2027. This volume, which I co-edited with Hayley O'Malley and Samantha N. Sheppard at the invitation of the Collins estate, brings together an extraordinary body of Collins' unproduced and unpublished scripts. It draws on original archival research and oral-history interviews to offer a nuanced and accessible account of Collins’ writing process and the historical conditions of her work.

Incomplete (2023)

My efforts to disseminate Collins' unproduced plays and screenplays is part of a larger project that aims to establish the feminist value of recovering and studying women's unfinished creative labour. This project was initiated with Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, a collection of essays I co-edited with Stefan Solomon that establishes unfinished film projects—abandoned, interrupted, lost, or open-ended—as rich and underappreciated resources for feminist film and media studies.

Published in 2023 as part of the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press, Incomplete was awarded Best Edited Collection by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2024–2025) and the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies (2024). Incomplete also received Honorable Mention for the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture, was shortlisted for the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association Edited Collection of the Year, and was longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award.

The recording of the online launch of Incomplete is available to view here. I've shared about this project on Finnish Radio, BBC Radio Wales Arts Show, BBC 3's New Thinking, the podcasts Unfinishing and New Books Network, and at an online event hosted by the Center for Media and Celebrity Studies. I have also presented work from this project at events at Berlin’s Silent Green/Kino Arsenal and Swansea’s Volcano Theatre.

In November 2022 in Cardiff, Stefan and I co-curated a film festival and workshop series in connection with this work, which featured film practitioners and scholars from around the world. Unfinished: Women Filmmakers in Process was presented in partnership with Chapter Arts Centre and funded by a grant awarded by Cardiff's College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Innovation for All fund. The festival programme, featuring essays by myself, Stefan, Hannah Hamad, Mathilde Rouxel, and Karen Redrobe, is available to view here. Articles about the festival appeared on Wales Arts Review and the Feminist Studies Association newsletter.

In and Out of Sight (2018)

My first book, In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen, was published as part of the Modernist Literature and Culture Series at Oxford University Press in 2018; a paperback version was released in 2023. Drawing on work in visual culture studies that emphasises the interplay between still and moving images, this book provides a new account of the relationship between photography and modernist literature—literature that has long been considered to trace, in its formal experimentation, the influence of modern visual technologies. Work from and adjacent to this project appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, and Arizona Quarterly.

In The Year's Work in English Studies, Shawna Ross praised the innovative and interdisciplinary methodology of In and Out of Sight, stating that the book "may be the most thrilling offering of 2018." In and Out of Sight was also reviewed in Modernism/modernity as a "probing, artful, and original" study that, in its methodology of "critical montage," "poses important questions for the future of modernist studies." The reviewer for American Literary History called it “powerful and persuasive,” “one of several exciting and innovative accounts of the relation between literature and photography to appear in recent years," while the reviewer for MFS: Modern Fiction Studies described it as a “daring,” “effective,” and “impressive first book [that] makes significant contributions not just to the reading of literary and visual modernism but to the understanding of gender, race, and class in twentieth-century American culture.”

Further positive reviews have appeared in The Modern Language Review, The Modernist Review, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and Feminist Modernist Studies.

Invited Lectures and Funding

I have given invited lectures connected to my research at more than 30 universities in the UK, US, and Australia, including at the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes University, the University of Bristol, the University of Exeter, the University of York, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Cambridge, University College Dublin, Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, Ca'Foscari University of Venice, the University of Oslo, the University of New South Wales, and the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University.

My research has been supported by numerous grants, including the Senior Research Fellow in the International Excellence in the Humanities Program, Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (MaCI), Université Grenoble Alpes, in 2025, the Association for Art History Research Grant in 2023, the American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in 2020, the Australian Academy of the Humanities Research Travel Grant and Publication Subsidy in 2017, the Modernist Studies Association Research Travel Grant in 2016, and the Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship in American Literature at the University of Virginia in 2012.

Current teaching

I have developed and led several modules as part of Cardiff's English Literature and Creative Writing degree programmes, each of which emerges from and feeds into my research, while also incorporating creative pedagogy and assessment. In 2026–2027, I will introduce two new second-year undergraduate modules I have co-developed, "Seen and Unseen: Tracing the (In)Visible in Film and Visual Culture" and "Feminisms." I also regularly teach the third-year undergraduate module "Representing Race in Contemporary America," and, at MA level, "The Feminist Incomplete."

Representing Race in Contemporary America

This module explores contemporary representations of African American experience—from literature and film to popular music and television—in the context of a longer history of African American cultural production. It pairs very recent works such as Jordan Peele’s horror comedy Get Out, Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, artist Janelle Monáe’s "emotion picture" Dirty Computer and comedian Issa Rae’s HBO show Insecure with others dating from the second half of the twentieth century. In examining these modern and contemporary texts in conversation with one another, we will explore how authors and makers work with and against established traditions and genres. Our discussion of issues of identity and inequity will approach race in connection with other forms of social difference, including class, gender, and sexuality.

The Feminist Incomplete

This module examines unfinished projects by women in the twentieth century and their afterlives in the present. Whether abandoned, interrupted, or lost, unfinished projects are usually dismissed as unworthy objects of study, seen as minor works and as marred by gaps and flaws. Yet women’s incomplete texts can be essential resources for feminist scholars. Offering a window onto the conditions of creative labour, unfinished works also incarnate women’s drive to write, to make films, to be artists—often against great odds. Students will undertake original work with the diverse objects that compose incomplete projects, from archival fragments and drafts to “complete” works adjacent to or reconstituting unfinished materials. In innovating feminist methods that preserve a sense of the projects’ materiality and potentiality, we will learn from the creative work of scholars and practitioners to reimagine unfinished projects. We will also engage the ethical issues that attend the recovery of such works, opening onto vital questions for the (also unfinished) project of feminist history.

Guest teaching at international institutions

I have taught guest sessions for undergraduate and graduate students at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School, Sydney; Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota; the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; The New School, New York City; the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie; and Xiamen University Malaysia, Sepang.

I was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. At the University of Sydney, I earned a Bachelor of Arts (Media and Communication, English, History) with Distinction, before going on to postgraduate study in the Department of English, where I received First Class Honours in 2009 and a doctorate in 2015.

Following the completion of my studies, I taught widely in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and the Department of Art History at the University of New South Wales. From 2016–2017, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney's United States Studies Centre. I moved to Cardiff in 2017 to assume the post of Lecturer in English; I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in English in 2019 and to Reader to Literature and Visual Culture in 2023. In 2024, I received the prestigious Dillwyn Medal in Humanities and Creative Arts from the Learned Society of Wales, in recognition of my contribution to Wales' research culture.

At Cardiff, I am the Postgraduate Research Lead for English Literature, Critical and Cultural Theory, and Creative Writing, and a founding member and co-convenor of Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture, which provides innovative contexts for academics and students working on visual culture to connect with artists and practitioners.

Honours and awards

Research fellowships and grants

Cardiff University/UKRI Harmonised Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) Strategic Impact Fund Awards, for “Incomplete Evidence” and “Unwriting Experiments”, 2026
Research Wales Innovation Fund Future Generations Engagement Award, for “Unwriting Workshops”, 2025
Senior Research Fellowship, International Excellence in the Humanities Program, Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (MaCI), Université Grenoble Alpes, 2025
Cardiff University/UKRI IAA Strategic Impact Fund Award, for “Reimagining Women’s Unfinished Film in Wales,” 2025
Welsh Government Taith Mobility Grant for research placement at Macquarie University, 2024
Association for Art History Grant for Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen, 2023
Cardiff University College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Innovation for All Award for "In Process: Women Filmmakers, Unfinished Films," 2022
American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant, 2020
Cardiff University Research Leave Scheme (competitive award for research leave), 2019
Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) Research Travel Grant, 2017
AAH Publication Subsidy for In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen, 2017
Anglican Deaconess Ministries Senior Research Fellowship, 2017
University of Sydney Department of English Grant for Publication, 2016
Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Travel Grant for Annual Conference, 2016
MSA Research Travel Grant, 2016
MSA Travel Grant for Annual Conference, 2015
University of Virginia Lillian Gary Taylor Fellowship in American Literature, 2012
Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Graduate Student Scholarship for Annual Conference, 2012
University of Sydney Postgraduate Travel Grant Award, 2012
University of Sydney Postgraduate Support Scheme Funding, 2012
Australian Postgraduate Award for duration of PhD candidature, 2010

Prizes

Society for Cinema and Media Studies Award for Best Edited Collection, for Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, 2025
Dillwyn Medal for Outstanding Early Career Research in Humanities and Creative Arts, Learned Society of Wales, 2024
British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Award for Best Edited Collection, for Incomplete, 2023
Honourable mention, Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Anthology, Multi-Authored, or Edited Book in Feminist Studies in Popular and American Culture, for Incomplete, 2023
Shortlisted, Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association Edited Collection of the Year, for Incomplete
Longlisted, Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, for Incomplete
Nominee, Library Company of Philadelphia Innovation Award, for Object Women: A History of Women in Photography, 2019

Teaching awards and training

Nominee, Most Innovative Staff Member and Personal Tutor of the Year, Enriching Student Life Awards, Cardiff University, 2019
Nominee, Most Innovative Staff Member, Enriching Student Life Awards, Cardiff University, 2018
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) Student Teaching Commendations for “Transatlantic Negotiations” and “Imagining America,” University of Sydney, 2016
FASS Student Teaching Commendations for “Literature and Cinema,” “Imagining America,” and “Novel Worlds,” University of Sydney, 2015
FASS Student Teaching Commendations for “Imagining America,” University of Sydney, 2014
FASS Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Teaching, University of Sydney, 2012
Certificate of Completion, Teaching Development Program, University of Sydney, 2011

Professional memberships

Member of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present
Member of the Modern Languages Association
Member of the Modernist Studies Association and coleader of the Special Interest Group in Film Studies
Member of the British Association for Modernist Studies
Member of the Irish Association for American Studies
Member of the Women's Film and Television History Network UK/Ireland
Member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Advisory Board Member of the Modernist Network Cymru

Academic positions

2023–present: Reader in Literature and Visual Culture, School of English, Communication and Philosophy (ENCAP), Cardiff University
2024–2025: External Examiner, English Language and Literature Programme, Xiamen University Malaysia
2019–2023: Senior Lecturer in English, ENCAP, Cardiff University
2021–2022: Exernal Examiner, English Literature Undergraduate Program, University of Sussex
2017–2019: Lecturer in English, ENCAP, Cardiff University
2016–2017: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney
2016: Sessional (Adjunct) Lecturer, Department of Art History, University of New South Wales
2014–2016: Sessional (Adjunct) Lecturer, Department of English, University of Sydney

Speaking engagements

Invited lectures and appearances (selected):

Guest speaker at Women’s Screen Work in Archives Made Visible workshop, Swansea University, 16 June 2026
"Creativity in Motion: Unfinishing Women's Film and Literary History," Media Aesthetics Workshop, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, 7 November 2025
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," English Language and Literature Department, Xiamen University Malaysia, 22 May 2025
"Creativity in Motion: Unfinishing Women's Film and Literary History," Centre for Arts, Media and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University, 30 April 2025
"Creativity in Motion: Unfinishing Feminist Film and Literary History," Department of English, University of Bristol, 20 November 2024
"Creativity in Motion: Unfinishing Feminist Film and Literary History," Cinema and Media Studies Department, University of Chicago, 6 November 2024
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," Film Studies Program and the Department of English, Michigan State University, 20 September 2024
"Kathleen Collins's 'Blue Obstacles': Scenes from an Unfinished Novel," Novel Theory and Modernism Seminars, Harvard University, 17 September 2024
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," Screen Studies Research Centre, University of Exeter, 8 May 2023
"Revaluing Unfinished Creative Work," Capstone for Masters of Arts in Screen Studies, Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Sydney, 18 April 2024
Launch event for Incomplete with screening and discussion, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature, Macquarie University, Sydney, 10 April 2024
"Image Encounters and the Feminism of Photography," Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University, 5 April 2024
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," Department of English, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 4 April 2023
"Image Encounters and the Feminism of Photography," Penn Cinema and Media Studies Colloquium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 25 October 2023
"The Photographic Nude: Surface, Skin, Flesh," Gender and Technology Seminar Series, School of English and Modern Languages, Oxford Brookes University, 17 February 2022 (online)
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture, Stanford University, 17 November 2021 (online)
"Kathleen Collins...Posthumously," Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Research Seminar Series, Department for English Studies, Durham University (online), 4 November 2021
Guest respondent for Ann Tartsinis, "Cut n' Paste in Reverse: Reading George Platt Lynes's Scrapbooks," Working Group for Literary and Visual Culture, Stanford University (online), Wednesday 26 May 2021
"The Photographic Nude: Surface, Skin, Flesh," with Anne Anlin Cheng as respondent, International Seminar: New Research in Gender and Sexuality," Ca' Foscari University of Venice (online), 29 January 2021
"Mothering Photography: Gertrude Käsebier and the Maternal Line of Sight,” Humanities Institute and the Department of English, Drama, and Film, University College Dublin (online), 7 October 2020

Public engagement activities (selected):

Co-organiser and host, with Ailbhe Darcy and Christina Thatcher, Radioactive Fossils: A Creative Experiment, Chapter Arts Centre, 16 July 2026
Co-organiser and host, with Meena Saverimuttu, "All Our Exes Are Unfinished Films," public event featuring lecture–performances by four Welsh women filmmakers, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 24 August 2025 (funded by Cardiff University/UKRI Harmonised Impact Acceleration Account Strategic Impact Fund)
Introduction to screening of Kathleen Collins' Losing Ground (1982) and public lecture, "Creativity in Motion: Unfinishing Women's Film and Literary History," Maison de la Création et de l’Innovation (MaCI), Université Grenoble Alpes, 9 April 2025
Conversation with Sibil Çekmen, Missing Documentaries, MaCI, Université Grenoble Alpes, 26 March 2025
Guest panelist, Book Talk: Incomplete, Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (online), 26 October 2024
Guest speaker, Feminist Library sessions, Ffoto Cymru Festival, Ffotogallery, 17 October 2024
Guest speaker, Film Screening: Some Chance Operations, Volcano Theatre, Swansea, hosted by the Feminist Studies Association, 12 December 2023
Guest introduction, Screening of The Red Shoes (dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948), Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 10 December 2023
Guest speaker, New Thinking: Rediscovering Women Making Film and Sculpture, Arts & Ideas, BBC Radio 3/BBC Sounds, 17 November 2023
Guest speaker, Fil m Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, Silent Green and Kino Arsenal, Berlin, 20–23 July 2023
Guest speaker, Unfinishing podcast, 30 October 2023
Guest speaker, New Books Network: Film podcast, 2 August 2023
Presenter, Looking for Léontine, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, 18 June 2023
Guest speaker, BBC Radio Wales Arts Show, "Creative Women," 10 March 2023
Guest speaker, Finnish Radio, 18 December 2022
Curator and presenter, Unfinished: Women Filmmakers in Process, Chapter Arts Centre, 17–20 November 2022
Host of Cardiff BookTalk on Octavia Butler's Kindred, online seminar hosted by Cardiff University, 3 March 2021
Organiser, with Jess Cotton, and speaker, The Masked Face, online seminar hosted by Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture, Cardiff University, 25 November 2020
Organiser, host, and speaker, Instagram: A Symposium, sponsored by Image Works, National Museum of Wales, 29 February 2020

Committees and reviewing

Professional service:

Postgraduate Research Lead, English Literature, Critical and Cultural Theory, and Creative Writing, School of Global Humanities (2026–present)
Director of Internationalisation, School of English, Communication and Philosophy (ENCAP), Cardiff University, 2024–2026
External Examiner, English Language and Literature Programme, Xiamen University Malaysia, 2024–2025
Founding co-organiser, Special Interest Group in Film Studies at the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), 2023–2024
Director of Recruitment and Admissions, ENCAP, 2021–2024
Member, Judging Committee for the MSA Annual Book Prize, 2021
Member, ENCAP Recruitment and Admissions Committee, 2019–2020
Founding member and convenor, Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture, 2018 ongoing
Advisory board member, Modernist Network Cymru, 2018 ongoing
Founder and convenor, Modern and Contemporary Workshop, ENCAP, 2017 ongoing
Early Career Representative, Research Strategy Committee, ENCAP, 2018–2020
Co-convenor, with Catherine Laing, Cardiff BookTalk, 2017–2019
Member, Equality and Diversity Committee, ENCAP, 2017–2018

Editing and reviewing:

Editorial advisory board member, Unmade Film and Television book series at Intellect, 2020 ongoing
Founding editor, Visualities forum, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, 2019 ongoing
Manuscript reviewer, MIT Press, Edinburgh University Press, Oxford University Press, and Rowman & Littlefield
Journal reviewer, Twentieth-Century Literature, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, ELH: English Literary History, Feminist Modernist Studies, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Literature and History, Modernism/modernity, Screen, Sociologica, and Women's Studies Quarterly

My PhD students have produced or are producing important feminist scholarship exploring literature, film, and visual art. I have experience supervising both research and creative practice PhDs and I have supported and made successful applications for postgraduate funding through the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council.

I would be happy to hear from prospective PhD students and postdoctoral scholars who are interested in pursuing projects in areas that connect to my expertise. I am especially keen to supervise projects that engage with or sit alongside my ongoing work on the feminist incomplete. More general areas of interest include:

modern and contemporary literature, especially in the U.S.;
visual culture studies (especially photography and film);
intermediality, i.e. the relationships between media forms;
gender and feminist studies, and;
African American studies.

Current supervision

Shaista Chishty

Sam McGuire

Past projects

Josie Cray, “Surrealist Experimentation in the Work of Anaïs Nin” (2025)
Beth Pyner, "Intermediality and/as Encounter: A Feminist Approach to Women's Contemporary Intermedial Memoirs" (2024)
Annie Strausa, "Sensory Aesthetics and Feminist Modernisms: A Revisionary Study of Novels by Virginia Woolf, Gloria Naylor, and Naomi Mitchison" (2023)
Ala'a Al Ghamdi, “Arab-American Women’s Writing after 9/11” (2023)
ReBecca Compton, “RPG: Role-playing Gender: The Effects of Representations of Gender in Video Games on the Real World” (2019)

Dr Beeston has been awarded a Senior Research Fellowship at the prestigious Maison de la Création et de l'Innovation (MaCI).

Contact Details

[email protected]
+44 29208 75412
John Percival Building, Room 1.21, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU

Research themes

Specialisms

Literary studies
Film and Television
Photography studies
Feminist studies

Dr Alix Beeston (she/her) BA Dist, Hons First Class, PhD (Sydney)

Teams and roles for Alix Beeston

Reader in Literature and Visual Culture

Overview

Upcoming events:

Recent and forthcoming publications:

Publication

2027

2026

2025

2024