About

Dr Alix Beeston is a writer and academic whose work advances interdisciplinary approaches to literature, film, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also experimenting with new modes of scholarly writing and dissemination.

Closing discussion of Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema, Berlin 20–23 July 2023 © Film Undone, photo by Gianmarco Bresadola

Currently Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University, Wales, Alix is committed to developing feminist methods for understanding allusive or underappreciated textual forms. Her work revalues 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.

In the early years of her career, Alix explored the feminist possibilities of modernist literature and photography. These gap-ridden and serialised forms are both mutually constitutive and highly equivocal in their meanings, as she demonstrated in her first book, In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford University Press, 2018, paperback 2023) and the digital project Object Women. Now, Alix’s focus has moved to the later twentieth century and the contemporary moment as she undertakes an expansive research project on women’s unfinished creative labour. The first stage of this project is Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of Unfinished Film. Coedited by Alix and Stefan Solomon, Incomplete was published as part of the Feminist Media Histories series at the University of California Press in 2023 and was awarded Best Edited Collection by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. In November 2022, Stefan and Alix cocurated Unfinished: Women Filmmakers in Process, a film festival at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.

Alix’s experiments with new approaches to researching and writing about open-ended and fragmentary artifacts, objects, and histories include a forthcoming book tentatively titled Image Encounters: Photography and the Feminist Art of Being Seen. Offering a complex backstory to the rise of the selfie, this critical–creative account of women and girls in photography is composed of a series of interlinked microessays that closely attend to specific images from across the medium’s history. It argues, iteratively, that the feminism of photography consists in its functions as a medium of encounter.

Alix is the founder and coeditor, with Pardis Dabashi, of the Visualities forum at the online platform of Modernism/modernity; the coorganiser, with Hayley O’Malley and John Hoffman, of the Film Studies Special Interest Group at the Modernist Studies Association; and a founding member and previous convenor of Image Works: Research and Practice in Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She is also an experienced and highly engaging public speaker and moderator, having presented screenings, roundtables, and other public events at numerous venues in Cardiff (including Chapter Arts Centre, National Museum Cardiff, and Ffotogallery), as well as Swansea’s Volcano Theatre and Berlin’s Silent Green, among others.

Alix lives in Cardiff with her husband Dave, a songwriter and musician. You can learn a bit more about their work in this profile. Follow Alix on Instagram and Twitter.