Newcastle University

Roles and Responsibilities

I am on research leave Semester Two 2011/12

Qualifications

BA (UEA), MA (UCL), PhD (Cambridge)

Research Interests

American literature and visual culture; modernism and the avant-garde.

Current Work

I am currently working on a number of projects relating to, for example, military bunkers, art schools, modern ruins, documentary film, land art, and landscape photography.

You can read the introduction to Dirty Wars here.

Postgraduate Supervision

Topics covered among current PhD students include radical American writing of the 1930s; transatlantic Pynchon; surrealism and American poetry.

PhDs supervised to successful completion include theses on World War II and postmodernism; Paul Auster and European philosophy; the idea of America in Anglo-American Romantic poetry; literature, mapping and the Great Plains; Nietzsche and Beckett; Reagan, Thatcher, and the social novel: and the flâneur in New York writing.

Funding

AHRC Research Leave Award (2007)
British Academy Small Grant (2002)

Undergraduate Teaching

SEL2207 Modernisms
SEL3355 Modern Poetry [new module 2012/13]

I also contribute to Introduction ot Literary Studies II and Literary Theory.

• Beck J. Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
• Beck J. Writing the radical centre : William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American cultural politics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.
• Beck J, Cornford M. The Art School in Ruins. Journal of Visual Culture 2012, 11(1), 58-83.
• Beck J. Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times: Photography as Double Agent. Theory, Culture & Society 2011, 28(7-8), 123-139.
• Beck J. The Place of Catastrophe: Mike Davis, Clarence King and the Politics of Contingency. In: Heffernan, N. ; Wragg, D.A, ed. Culture, Environment and Eco-Politics. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011, pp.84-110.
• Beck J. Concrete Ambivalence: Inside the Bunker Complex. Cultural Politics 2011, 7(1), 79-102.
• Beck J. Et in Arizona Ego: Baudrillard on the Planet of the Apes. In: Bishop, R, ed. Baudrillard Now: Current Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies. Cambridge: Polity, 2009, pp.100-115.
• Beck J, Crosthwaite P (eds.). Velocities of Power: An Introduction. Cultural Politics 2007, 3(1), 23-34.
• Beck J. Resistance Becomes Ballistic: Vanishing Point and the End of the Road. Cultural Politics 2007, 3(1), 35-50.
• Beck J, Holloway D, ed. American Visual Cultures. London and New York:Continuum,2005.
• Beck J. Zapruder, Warhol, and the Accident of Images. In: David Holloway and John Beck, ed. American Visual Cultures. London: Continuum, 2005.
• Beck J. Reading Room: Erosion and sedimentation in Sebald's Suffolk. In: Long, J.J., Whitehead, A., ed. W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004, pp. 75-88.
• Beck J. Filibusterers and Fundamentalists: Blood Meridian and the New Right. Polemics: Essays in American Literary and Cultural Criticism 2004, 1, 13-26.
• Paton D, Beck J, Robinson G. Teaching "the Americas". Radical History Review 2004. North Carolina: Duke University Press, (89), 218-229.
• Beck J. Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain. Nepantla: Views From South 2001, 4(2), 55-75.
• Beck J. '"It wasn't the future that brought me back here." Borderline Nostalgia and Global Impact'. Rio Bravo: A Journal of Borderlands. New Series 2000, 2(1), 43-52.
• Beck J. An Over-illuminated World: Reyner Banham and Art History in the Wilderness. Everything 2000, 3, 26-33.
• Beck J. 'Blown Away: Wars Visible and Invisible in Richard Misrach’s Desert Cantos'. European Journal of American Culture 2000, 19(3), 156-166.
• Beck, J. '"A Certain but Fugitive Testimony": Witnessing the Light of Time in Cormac McCarthy's Southwestern Fiction'. Southwestern American Literature 1999, 25, 124-132.
• Beck, John. 'Buckminster Fuller and The Politics of Shelter'. In: Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, ed. Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism. Oxford: Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 116-125.
• Beck, John. 'Prolapsed Metropolis: The Entropic New Jersey of William Carlos Williams and Robert Smithson'. Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 1998, 5(3), 240-252.