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Beth Pyner

Dr Beth Pyner

(she/her)

Teams and roles for Beth Pyner

Overview

My research develops intersectionally feminist approaches to, and methodologies for reading, intermediality - the study of the relationship between different forms of media. My doctoral research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, analyses a transnational collection of women’s contemporary, intermedial memoirs integrating multiple medial forms, including prose, photography, illustration, archive, filmic epistolarity, and reconstructive photography and film. Arguing for the reappraisal of intermediality as a series of material encounters, I provide the first scholarly analysis of intermediality and/as encounter. By engaging with encounters staged between and among media, alongside each memoir’s representation of encounters between and among women and girls, I conceptualise “encounter-as-practice”—a pathbreaking, intersectionally feminist, self-reflexive method for encountering diverse intermedial forms and consuming representations of otherness.

In addition to delivering presentations on this project in the US, the UK, and Europe, I have published an article in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and was recently awarded Runner-up in the Graduate Student Writing Prize of Feminist Media Histories' Gender and Feminisms Caucus for a second article, shortly to be submitted for peer review with the journal. I am also preparing my thesis for publication as a monograph tentatively titled Encountering Otherness: Intermediality and/as Encounter in Women’s Contemporary, Intermedial Memoirs.

My next project builds on the innovations of my PhD by augmenting our understanding of the affective terrain of interpersonal encounters across a collection of contemporary, American re-archived materials. The project also expands on my experience of developing and applying comparative, interdisciplinary, and reflexive methodologies in my treatment of heterogeneous bodies of visual and literary materials. Responding to the recent proliferation of visual and literary materials that are reformulated from pre-existing archives, this project provides the first in-depth examination of re-archiving practices from construction to consumption. Studying film, photography, and hybridised visual-textual literature, I interrogate how re-archiving functions emotively for creators and audiences, to better understand the radical potentialities of re-archiving in an increasingly politicised, fragmented, and unstable world. Implementing an innovative, interdisciplinary methodology combining close textual analysis, theoretical research, interviews, public engagement, and autoethnography, the study proposes that re-archiving is a radical and affective mode of meaning making that contests unequal and oppressive hierarchies.

Upcoming events and appearances:

  • 16 April 2025, Guest Lecturer. 'Encounters in the Cinematic Gallery: Reading Intermediality in Diana Markosian's Santa Barbara.' Hosted by the Centre for Screen Cultures and the St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies at the University of St Andrews, and funded by the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies' New Connections scheme. For further information, please contact me (pynerbrc@cardiff.ac.uk) or Dr Lucy Fife Donaldson (lfd2@st-andrews.ac.uk)
  • April 2025, Keynote Speaker, English Literature MA Conference, ENCAP, Cardiff University

Publication

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

Biography

I completed my AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University in 2024. Prior to this, I gained an MA in Comparative Literature from King's College London (2014) and a BA in Hispanic Studies with European Studies from Queen Mary, University of London (2012).

I have taught widely across English Literature and Visual Culture modules at multiple levels. My experience includes leading an optional second-year module in feminist literature and film, delivering the core module for first-year undergraduates, guest lecturing in innovative round-table discussion formats, and providing lecture and seminar cover for a final-year course in contemporary representations of race in American culture.

Honours and awards

Research fellowships and grants

  • BAFTSS New Connections grant supporting travel and accommodation costs for delivering a guest lecture at the University of St Andrews, 16 April 2025
  • BAFTSS Travel Fund grant supporting travel and accommodation costs to deliver a research paper at the 2025 MLA convention in New Orleans, LA, January 2025
  • Modern Language Association Graduate Student grant supporting travel and accommodation costs to deliver a research paper at the 2025 MLA convention in New Orleans, LA, January 2025
  • AHRC research support grant covering travel to New York, USA to interview artist Diana Markosian, October 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, October 2023
  • AHRC research support grant covering travel to undertake research at Fotografiska, Stockholm, August 2023
  • AHRC research training support grant covering travel to the TV PhD Talent Scheme in Edinburgh, UK, June 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 the BAFTSS 2025 award for the Best Published Essay by a Doctoral Student. Award announced in 2025
  • Awarded Runner-up in the 2025 Graduate Student Writing Prize of Feminist Media Studies' Gender and Feminism Caucus, January 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
  • 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

Academic positions

  • 2025-present: Teaching Associate in English Literature and Visual Culture, Cardiff University. I am currently leading the module, 'Object Women in Literature and Film,' a second-year course exploring representations of object womanhood in the twentieth century, as well as exploring how feminist readings of seemingly objectifying texts might change the shape and scope of their meanings
  • 2020-2023: Postgraduate tutor, English Literature, Cardiff University. I led multiple seminar groups through the module 'Ways of Reading,' a introduction to literary theory course for first year undergraduates. 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 Presentations and Invited Lectures

  • Upcoming: Guest Lecturer, 'Encounters in the Cinematic Gallery: Reading Intermediality in Diana Markosian's Santa Barbara.' Centre for Screen Cultures and the St Andrews Institute for Gender Studies, University of St Andrews, 16 April 2025
  • Upcoming: Keynote Speaker, English Literature MA Conference, ENCAP, Cardiff University, April 2025
  • 'Collaborative, Intermedial Journeying in Diana Markosian's Santa Barbara,' MLA 2025, New Orleans, WA, 9-12 January 2025
  • '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

Contact Details

Email PynerBRC@cardiff.ac.uk

Specialisms

  • Visual cultures
  • Literary studies
  • Feminist studies
  • Photography studies
  • Film and Television

External profiles