Benedict researches literature and visual art produced during the AIDS Crisis, especially in New York. His PhD thesis identifies a group of writers and artists who used movement vocabularies to think through the stakes of their survival in the epidemic. This group, comprised of untrained dancers, looked to choreography not only as a source of inspiration for their work but also to find methods of grieving, mourning, and imagining the world otherwise. It brings dance studies into conversation with literary and visual disciplines to conceptualise a choreographic imaginary at work across artistic forms at the turn of the century.

Other research interests include late twentieth-century literature, film studies, dance criticism, art history, poetry and photography.

Publications

‘David Lynch, Embodiment and Mediality: Dealing With a Human Form’, Film-Philosophy, 26.3 (2022), 375–393.

Review of Michael D. Snediker’s Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment in European Journal of American Culture, 41.2 (2020), 215–217.

‘Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography - Review’, ASAP/J, May 2020.

Conferences

‘Samuel R. Delany, Turn Out, Sexual Resistance’, Quilting Points Symposium, University of Leeds, May 2024.

‘Turning Out with Samuel R. Delany: Sex, Risk and Contact’, Centre for Gender Studies Postgraduate Forum, University of Sussex, March 2024.

‘The Modernist Dance, The Transgressive Nymph: Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Holly Adams’s Nymphomania (1994)’, Screen, July 2022.

‘Space, Defection and Transparency in Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent’, University of York Postgraduate Conference, Spatial Modernities, 2021.