LUCY JEFFERY

Lucy Jeffery’s research focuses on twentieth-century literature and culture. Her monograph, Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process, considers how Samuel Beckett’s writing process was influenced by the paintings, music, and broadcasting media that he admired and with which he experimented. She has also written several chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals about the interdisciplinary work of Ezra Pound, Harold Pinter, and Ingeborg Bachmann. In 2022, she co-edited the 'A New Poetics of Space' special issue of Green Letters, which examines creative responses to the climate crisis as seen in representations of walking in literature and performance. 

After an initial trip to Budapest in April 2019 and countless more visits since then, Lucy’s interest in twentieth-century Hungarian literature and culture led to publications on one of Hungary’s best loved writers, Magda Szabó. Lucy is currently writing an article on the poet Miklós Radnóti entitled ‘A Forced March from Serbia to Hungary: Reading Miklós Radnóti’s Bori notesz as the Diary of a Refugee’ which picks up on her interests in the tradition of the literary walk and in twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Since receiving the Visegrad Scholarship in 2024, which saw her work at the Blinken Open Society Archives, Budapest, she has been writing an article entitled 'Curcumventing Censorship during the Kádár and Orbán eras'. 

Lucy’s involvement in the ‘Replaying Communism’ project is a continuation of this research into Hungary’s fraught cultural context during the years of occupation (first German then Soviet), albeit from a contemporary perspective. Having published on radio and television in her work on Beckett and Pinter, Lucy is drawing on this knowledge, and on insights from her research trips to the OSA, for her work with Dr Anna Váradi. Their collaboration resulted in the symposium in December 2023 and publication of a review of Lâszló Borhi's Survival Under Dictatorships: Life and Death in Nazi and Communist Regimes for the CEU Review of Books. It will also lead to the publication of two articles that explore representations of the Communist era in Hungary and the parallels between Party censorship then and Government censorship today. 

Please get in touch if you would like to contact Lucy about any of her research. 

Selected works