Dr Betsy Porritt

Dr Betsy Porritt

Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences
Teaching Fellow in Interdisciplinary Humanities

Contact details

Email
b.porritt@bham.ac.uk

I have been working as the LANS Teaching Fellow since October 2021. I am interested in practice-based teaching and research methods, specifically how knowledge can be produced collectively in ways that challenge existing academic traditions.

I have two poetry chapbooks; Oh Unquenchable Thirst with Distance No Object (2024) and A Mediated and Partial Zone with Guillemot Press (2022), and other poems, collages, and sound works can be found online and in a wide variety of print journals.

Qualifications

  • 2022: PhD Poetry: Text Practice as Research (University of Kent)
  • 2013: MA Issues in Modern Studies (UCL)
  • 2011: BA American and English Literature (University of East Anglia)

Teaching

  • Stage One: From Research to Policy I and II
  • Stage Two: Interdisciplinarity: Study & Practice
  • Stage Three: LANS Independent Research Project (Workshops & supervision); Film & Creative Writing: Dissertation
  • Masters: The World of Interdisciplinary Research, The Open Skills Box

Additional: Personal Tutor for students at all stages, The LANS Summer School, I have delivered many workshops on poetry as a creative-critical tool, most recently to PhD students and University of Warwick, students in the School of Dentistry, poets and poetry nerds at the Flow-Chart Foundation, Hudson, NY.

Forthcoming: Over the next couple of years I’ll be programme lead of the BA Liberal Arts, developing it over the next year and delivering it with academics and administrative staff from across the University.

Postgraduate supervision

 I am programme lead for the Liberal Arts and Sciences MRes (Masters of Research): Interdisciplinary Study. If you think you are ready to dive into your own research project and it is working beyond a single discipline please get in touch.

I am programme lead for the Liberal Arts and Sciences MRes (Masters by Research): Interdisciplinary Study. If you think you are ready to dive into your own research project and it is working beyond a single discipline please get in touch.

Research

Betsy’s practice-based PhD comprised of an academic thesis (‘Tangible Things’: Susan Howe’s Interdisciplinary Materials) and an equivalent body of poems (Complex Kinships: Five Sequences) that drew from and reflected her research into Susan Howe’s expanded field of poetry.

Betsy’s long-standing interests centre around poetry as an investigative lens, specifically the possibilities of sound to register, critique and rearticulate lived and imagined space.

She is a member of the Network for New York School Studies (NNYSS), and The Centre for Urban Wellness, University of Birmingham.

Other activities

  • Member of the Liberal Arts + Network

Publications

Academic research

  • Porritt, B. (forthcoming) Collaborative possibilities in Contemporary Sound Poetry, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
  • Porritt, B. Suleymenova, K. (2023) Communities of practice in multidisciplinary spaces, Conference proceedings: Learning Teaching Student Experience
  • Porritt, B. (2023) The Intimacy of the index, Jacket2
  • Porritt, B., Wiffen, D. (2022) Collective, anecdotal and generative refusal: A queer feminist pedagogy of the unknown, The Affects of Pedagogy in Literary Studies Handbook, Routledge 132-143

Poetry collections

  •  (2024) Oh Unquenchable Thirst, Distance No Object
  • (2022) A mediated & partial zone, Guillemot Press

 Individual poems

  •  (2023) Paternoster Square, Still Point Magazine
  •  (2023) Three Poems (Z, M, C), Ludd Gang
  •  (2022) The English Riviera, Trespassing
  • Porritt, B., Wiffen, D. (2021) “untitled”: Walking out alone we think together, Now I Know, Daylight: Responses to Untitled No 1 (1981) by Agnes Martin, Pilot Press
  • (2021) In the manner of a cup, Free Verse

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