Ph.D. English, University of Chicago (2017-2025 expected). Dissertation: Life in Fictional Worlds: Aesthetics, Physics, Ethics

M.A. English, University of Chicago (2019)

B.A. Hons. English, University of Chicago (2016); thesis: “Black and White Spectacle: Adapting Rape Revenge and Black Female Suffering in The Walking Dead” ; Trinity College Dublin (2014-15)

→ “Suiting Up, Taking Off: Movement, Special Effects, and Superheroes,” forthcoming in The New Review of Film and Television Studies (expected 2025)

• Abstract: Superheroes have been moving between comics and film since the earliest days of the genre, and this long and uneasy process of reciprocal adaptation reveals affordances of the moving image that are completely inaccessible to the still images on a comic book page. The formal rupture between sequential images in comics—governed by the mental processes gathered under the term “closure”—is smoothed over by the continuity of the moving image. In this formal transit between movement and stillness the superheroic body reveals or hides its aspects like a faceted stone turned in the light. Moments of thematized physical transformation which are inherently discontinuous on the page become live enactments enabled or stymied by the historical contingencies of film and effects technology. These transformations, represented in this essay by the quick-change suit up and the effect of continuous flight, do not only capture the tension between superhero comics and superhero movies, but also weigh the stakes and ideals carried within the superhero body.

→ Chapter: "Brown Skin and Comics Printing Technology,” Envisioning Blackness: Black Comics, Black Heroes, and the Black Imagination (Fantagraphics, forthcoming)

→ “4 Colorism: The Ashiness of It All,” Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (2020)

• Reprinted from Women Write About Comics, “4 Colorism” is a primer on printing technologies from the 1970s to the mid-1990s through the prism of the brown skin of Black superheroes. Prior to the 1990s superhero comics were letterpress printed on news-print, often with a palette of only 64 colors. In this period, colors were muted and prone to error across the whole page, but these printing and coloring methods were especially limiting to depictions of brown skin: brown was rendered unsettlingly greenish, inhuman, and inconsistent—especially in contrast to the relative consistency of white skin and the subtlety of whiteness within the same pages. Like photographic technology, letterpress printing on newsprint reinforced a certain blankness and normality of whiteness, while overdetermining brown skin with a hypervisible—and yet inadequate—quantity of ink. Cary-Beckett (Smith) combines close readings of her own collection of paper comics with industry and academic sources to understand the confluence of technology, husbandry, and market requirements that drove the slow progress of the Black comic book character from streaky green to rich brown.

→ University of Chicago Doctoral Fellowship, Franke Institute for the Humanities Affiliate (2024-2025)

→ Graduate Global Impact (GGI) Internship Program: Editorial Assistant for Megascope, an imprint of Abrams ComicArts (2020-2021)

→ Gilbert Seldes Prize for Public Scholarship (Comics Studies Society, 2019)

→ Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (2014)

→ Workshop: ““The Hell of This Earth”: Ethics of Worldmaking,” Franke Institute for the Humanities (2025)

→ Invited Panelist: “Being Out in the Classroom Now,” UChicago pedagogy forum (2023)

→ Panelist: “Black Butterflies: Author Talk,” UChicago PhD Research Symposium (2023)

→ Invited Respondent: “The Modernist Sequel,” a public workshop, UChicago (2023)

→ Invited Respondent: UChicago DoVA Open Practice Committee, featuring conceptual comics artist Ilan Manouach (2022)

→ Invited Respondent: “Gender, Race, and Comic Book Coloring,” San Diego Comic Con (2020)

→ Invited Speaker: “4 Colorism: Race, Color Processing, and Printing in Superhero Comics, 1970s-1990s,” Northeastern Illinois University (2018)

→ Panelist: “Maeve’s Phantom Pain: Kinship Bonds and the Genre-d Body in Westworld,” University of Maryland Graduate English Conference (2018)

→ Panelist: “‘The Hell of This Earth:’ God as a Character and as the Creator of Preacher’s World,” Comics Studies Society Conference (2018)

→ Panelist: “4 Colorism: Race, Color Processing, and Printing in Superhero Comics, 1970s-1990s,” Midwest Pop Culture Association/ Midwest American Culture Association Conference (2018)

→ popular fiction across media with a focus on comics, science fiction, and fantasy; narrative theory and genre theory.

→ contemporary aesthetics of fascism; eco-critical history of AI; dead internet theory.

→ comics studies, postmodern visual studies, and mass culture

→ race, racism, and genre formation (especially Western, fantasy, science fiction, and horror); theories of representation; Black studies.

→ transmedia studies: media theory, archeology, and technology (including AI and related infrastructures)

→ course descriptions and syllabi available upon request