Professor Fiona Becket

Profile

Teaching and research in modern and contemporary poetry.

My latest book is Contemporary Visual Poetry: Women Writing the Posthuman (Routledge, 2025). This book examines contemporary visual poetry by women and considers how conceptual writing, poem objects, and computational texts shape a posthumanist understanding that is ‘situated’. First, the eye is theorised with respect to ethical understanding. When visual poets reclaim vision, visual poetics becomes a feminist praxis. The discussion begins with an analysis of Mary Ellen Solt’s poem ‘Moonshot Sonnet’, and proceeds to the work of contemporary makers such as Dani Spinosa and Kate Siklosi. In Paula Claire and Maggie O’Sullivan, visual poetry becomes an ecological practice concerned with connectivity in the entanglements of naturecultures. In O’Sullivan, Campanello, Bergvall and Philip, spatial and temporal sense (de)formation sustains radical forms of voicing and eyewitness. Finally, works by Mez Breeze and Stephanie Strickland expand our understanding of visual poetry in digital (electronic, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence) contexts in which technology and affect are intimately connected. These visual texts open up Braidotti’s question with respect to how we are to ‘visualize the subject as a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language’.

‘Contemporary Visual Poetics not only offers an important rethinking of the history of “extended poetics,” as its author Fiona Becket names it, but breaks essential new ground across technologies which many critics still feel unsure of how to read. This book provides a vocabulary and a profound understanding of “posthuman” existence played out in the avant-garde poem, mapping new ways that such work is impacting its society and environment. Becket’s connection of her core investigation to ecocritical thinking—and therefore our current (we hope not final) emergencies—also makes this intervention timely, even urgent.’ (Romana Huk, Associate Professor, University of Notre Dame, USA).

I have also written on modernist and late-twentieth-century writing. My first book D. H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (1997) is a study of metaphor as a mode of understanding in Lawrence which concentrates on the fiction and discursive writing, especially his two books on the unconscious. It is a study which is informed by Heidegger's thought on language. In 2002, I examined the life, work and critical contexts informing Lawrence studies in The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence. More recently, I have written articles and book chapters on ‘green Lawrence’, or Lawrence and animality (eco-poetics) principally in the poetry and specifically Birds, Beasts and Flowers.

In 2019 I co-curated an exhibition of visual and concrete poetry called ‘Poetry by Design’ which was based on the holdings of concrete and visual poetry in the Brotherton Library special collections, an exhibition which also benefitted from loans and contributions from diverse private collections, and was accompanied by a conference.

My interests in environmental philosophy were first represented in a book with an interdisciplinary focus co-edited with Terry Gifford (Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, 2007). I have a sustained interest in the area of green cultural critique and the environmental humanities and I am interested in supervising doctoral work in this area. I welcome research proposals from potential students in any area of literary modernism, D. H. Lawrence studies; eco-criticism and green cultural critique; twentieth-century British and Irish writing; modern and contemporary poetry; visual and concrete poetry (including the much under-represented women experimental poets of the post-war period, up to the contemporary moment); poetry and technology; digital poetries. Applications from potential doctoral students who wish to use the resources of the Brotherton Library and the special collections are welcome.

I have supervised a large number of research students working on a range of topics which include representations of nature in the work of John Cowper Powys; the green poetics of Jon Silkin and Simon Armitage; modernist poetry and Jung; olfactory sensation in modernist writing; theorisations of the object in contemporary and Anglo-Saxon poetry; a comparative study of W. B. Yeats and Rabindranath Tagore; Ted Hughes and eco-poetics; James Joyce and irreverance; the poetics of Bob Cobbing and Steve McCaffery. I have also co-supervised practice-based PhDs.

Responsibilities

• WIT Lead 2025-26

Research interests

Modernist and Contemporary Literature; Contemporary Poetics; Digital Poetry and post-war poetry including avant-garde and experimental writing with a special interest in concrete and visual poetics; Literature & Environments (eco-poetics).

Qualifications

• PhD English Literature
• MA in English Literature
• BA in English Literature
• Diploma in Polish Language

Professional memberships

• British Association of Modernist Sudies
• Association of the Study of Literature and Environment

Student education

I teach on the core modules ‘Writing Environments: Literature, Nature, Culture’ and ‘Writing Matters’. I supervise Final Year Projects, MA dissertations, and PhDs.

Research groups and institutes

• Environmental Humanities Research Group

Current postgraduate researchers

• Charlotte Makepeace
• Jon Gilbert