Miss Lily Beckett

My research primarily focuses on the connections between intermedial poetic form and counter-hegemonic politics. I am particularly interested in the period which follows the acceleration of the modern capitalist world-system, beginning with William Blake around the 1790s and ending with poetries in the present.

In my thesis - tentatively titled 'Intermedial Poetry and its Production in the Era of Neo-Imperialism' - I am looking at a global range of anglophone poets, all of whom have incorporated different media into their poetry to produce works that exceed conventional written-word forms. Poets whose works I'll be examining include Cecilia Vicuña, Etel Adnan, Bhanu Kapil, Kamau Brathwaite, Isaac Julien, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. I am equally as interested in the intermedial forms of these poets' works as I am in the conditions of their production.

I started my PhD at Bristol in 2023 after completing a Master's in Comparative Literature at King's College London in 2022 and my undergraduate studies in Classics and English at Oxford University in 2021 (Regent's Park College). In 2024, I was awarded a fellowship by the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to undertake research on their collections related to Etel Adnan and Post-Apollo Press. In the Fall Semester of 2026, I will be returning to Berkeley as a visiting researcher at the Institute of European Studies.