People

DR LUCY JEFFERY

Post-doctoral Centre Fellow

lucy.jeffery@reading.ac.uk

 

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Beckett Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research looks at Beckett’s interest in and use of classical music and visual arts. In 2019/20 I compiled a catalogue for the audio-visual materials held at the Beckett Archive in Reading. I also edited interviews with practitioners for the Staging Beckett Project (available online). My first monograph on Beckett will be published this year (2021). As well publishing research on Beckett, I have also published on the work of Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó. If anyone is interested in these areas within Beckett Studies and would like to get in touch, please do so.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS 

  1. Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021) (available to pre-order).

  2. "Words and Music 'or some other trouble': Vaguening on the Airwaves" in Beckett and Technology eds. Mark Nixon, Galina Kiryushina, and Einat Adar (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming 2021).

  3. "Beckett and the Visual Arts" in The Oxford Handbook on Samuel Beckett eds. Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle (Oxford: OUP, 2022) (in press)

  • AS EDITOR
    • 'A New Poetics of Space: Literary Walks in Times of Pandemics and Climate Crisis': Special Issue for Green Letters (September, 2022).

PUBLICATIONS

  1. "A Metatopographic Reading of Magda Szabó’s Abigail as a Response to the Treaty of Trianon". Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 48.3. 2021, pp. 223-245.
  2. "Palliative Care and the Dance of Death in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight". The Harold Pinter Review, 5.1. 2021, pp. 10-16.
  3. "Magda Szabó: Finding Home in the Homeland in Post-1956 Hungary". [sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 11.3 Changing Pieces. 2020, pp. 1-23.
  4. "Natasha Gordon in Conversation with Lucy Jeffery: 'it was around 7.27pm that suddenly diversity walked through the door'". ArtsPraxis, 7.2b. 2020, pp. 26-52. 
  5. "Chapter 11: Collective Responsibility in Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Werner Henze’s Radio Drama The Cicadas" in Radio Art and Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Politics, eds. Jarmila Mildorf and Pim Verhulst (Minneapolis: Lexington Books, 2020), pp. 185-205.
  6. "Pinter as Poet, Pinter as Politician". The Harold Pinter Review, 4.1. 2020, pp. 20-35. 
  7. "An Interview with Tim Parkinson". Journal of Beckett Studies, 29.2. 2020, pp. 249-260.
  8. "'An Old Hullo Out of the Dark': Radio echoes between Samuel Beckett’s and Harold Pinter". Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 40.3. 2020, pp. 516-532.
  9. "Ezra Pound and Constantin Brancusi: Sculptural Form and the Struggle to 'make it cohere'". Word & Image, 36.3. 2020, pp. 237-247.
  10. "Music in Samuel Beckett’s radio play Embers: ‘I shouldn’t be hearing that!’". Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, 16.2. 2018, pp.173-184.
  11. "Samuel Beckett’s brush with the other Mitchell: Painterly Techniques in ‘One Evening'". Journal of Beckett Studies, 27.2. 2018, pp. 175-192.
  12. "Samuel Beckett’s use of color in Company: Blue". Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory, 20. 4. 2018, pp. 507-527. 
  13. "Bridging Music and Language in Samuel Beckett’s Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume". Durham Postgraduate English Journal, 32. Spring, 2016.

REVIEWS

  1. "Review: Beckett's Creatures: Art of Failure After the Holocaust by James Anderson". The Harold Pinter Review, 4.1. 2020, pp. 128-132.
  2. "Michael Roth’s Imagination Dead Imagine, Prague, 13 September 2018". Journal of Beckett Studies, 28.2. 2019, pp. 255-259.
  3. "Beckett and Collaboration: A Review of Words and Music for the Beckett Chamber Music Series". Journal of Beckett Studies, 28.1. 2019, 113-124.
  4. "Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art, eds. Robert Reginio, David Houston Jones and Katherine Weiss Review". Journal of Beckett Studies, 27.2. 2018, 270-274.
  5. "Beckett Week at Reading: Beckett & Politics Conference". The Beckett Circle. Autumn, 2016.

BLOGS

  1. ‘Happy Days at Manchester’s Royal Exchange theatre, 25 May – 23 June’, Staging Beckett, 3 August 2018

TALKS

As well as organising conferences and workshops in Reading, Aberystwyth, and Sweden, I have delivered papers on my research at international conferences & seminars.

  1. "A Very Short Introduction to Samuel Beckett." University of Nottingham (the Nottingham Playgoers), June 21, 2021.
  2. "Global Godot". University of Kent, March 8, 2021.
  3. "Magda Szabó's Abigail as a response to the Treaty of Trianon". Mid Sweden University, September 11, 2020.
  4. "Magda Szabó's The Door and Goulash Communism". Mid Sweden University, June 16, 2020. 
  5. "Pinter’s Poetry and American Politics". Midwest Modernist Language Association, Chicago, November 14, 2019.
  6. "Tracing Digital Legacies and the (Im)Materiality of Death in the Performance User Not Found". The Materiality of Death: On the Trail of Grave Goods (Past, Present and Future), British Museum, London, May 31, 2019.
  7. "Going Green: An Ecocritical Reading of Beckett’s Landscapes in the Novellas". Beckett International Foundation Seminar, University of Reading, November 24, 2018.
  8. "'[N]ot a sound': Samuel Beckett’s influence on Harold Pinter’s Landscape". Pinter on Film, Television and Radio, British Library, London, September 19-20, 2018.
  9. "Words and Music 'or some other trouble'". Beckett and Technology, Charles University, Prague, September 13-15, 2018.
  10. "Beckett and Colour: A Negative Optimism". Influences, Intersections, Interactions, Charles University, Prague, September 8-9, 2017.
  11. "The 'Dark lightens' when in Company: Painterly Technique in Beckett’s Late Style". Modernist Life, BAMS Birmingham University, June 29 – 1 July 1, 2017.
  12. "A note on Beckett’s decomposition". FTT Departmental Research Presentations, University of Reading, November 30, 2016.
  13. "Cheese and Biscuits: Beckett’s Musical Monadology". DRAFF, Trinity College Dublin, August 5-6, 2016.
  14. "Watt about Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Legacy?" Altered States: Postgraduate Conference, MONC Swansea University, October 9, 2015.
  15. "Memory in Samuel Beckett and Geneviève Asse’s 'blue celeste'". Arts and Humanities research presentations, Swansea University, September 2015.
  16. "Score to Text: Musical Form in Samuel Beckett’s Late TV-Plays: Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume". Music and Literature: Critical Polyphonies, Durham University, July 2, 2015.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

I have designed several websites showcasing the impact of research projects and have lectured in literature and theatre at the universities of Swansea, Reading, Mid Sweden, and Nottingham. At Reading, I led the Beckett Reading Group from 2017-19. I was also the postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC funded project ‘User Not Found: Social Media Technology in Immersive Performance’ and contributed to ‘Staging Beckett’. Having organised the international conference 'A New Poetics of Space: Literary Walks in Times of Pandemics and Climate Change', I am currently working on a special issue on the tradition of the literary walk.