Professor Beicken  teaches 20th/21st century Austrian and German literature focusing on Fin de Siècle, Expressionism, the Weimar Republic, Exile, and Post-war literature and culture including GDR-Studies. Best known for his expertise and publications on Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann and Franz Kafka, Beicken has placed additional emphasis on authors such as Aichinger, Bernhard, Celan, Fleisser, Fühmann, Kafka, Keun, Seghers and C. Wolf.

Beicken's nine (9) books (7 authored, 1 co-authored, 1 edited) include: Kafka. Eine kritische Einführung in die Forschung. Frankfurt: Athenäum Fischer, 1974; 'Die Verwandlung'. Erläuterungen und Dokumente. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983, revised 1998; Franz Kafka. Leben und Werk, Stuttgart: Klett,1986, revised 1994. His "Autorenbuch" on Ingeborg Bachmann. (Munich: Beck, 1988) was enlarged and revised in 1992. His second monograph on Ingeborg Bachmann was published by Reclam in Stuttgart in 2001. Beicken's  most recent book publication is an edition in the Anna Seghers Werkausgabe (2014).

In film studies Beicken has co-authored (with Robert P. Kolker) The Films of Wim Wenders: Cinema as Vision and Desire. New York, London: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A Greek edition, enlarged by Beicken's chapter on Wenders' films of the 1990s, appeared in Thessaloniki in 1997. Also, Reclam published his Wie interpretiert man einen Film?, an introduction to film studies in 2004, reprinted 2005.

Beicken approaches literature and film from cultural, semiotic, and psychoanalytic perspectives. He pursues intermedial relations including concepts of the body (Körperbilder), gender studies, sexual identities. Beicken has presented seminars on: Bachmann, Kafka, Literatur- und Filmanalyse, , Wenders und Handke, Kafka and Film, Gender and Space in Film, Opera in Film. Most recently Beicken offered an interdisciplinary seminar on Flanerie, Exteriority, Exile, on Verfilmung and German-Jewish Writers (Kafka, Seghers, Benjamin, Celan).

Focusing his more recent research on the intersections of literature and film, Beicken has presented papers at conferences and published several articles on Kafka's cinematic writing, visual pleasures and the gaze/gays in Kafka. Recently he also presented on the intersections of biography and poetry in Celan. Beicken recently contributed an article on Büchner and Seghers to a volume on Büchner.

A Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in 2001-2002, Beicken also was a Center of Teaching Excellence Lilly-Fellow in 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. He served as visiting professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1987), Georgetown University (1989), Universität Giessen (1997), Universität Wuppertal (1997). From 2003-2008 Beicken directed College Park Scholars in the Arts, a living-learning community of undergraduate freshmen and sophomores.

In 1984 Beicken was awarded the Eduard-von-der-Heydt-Preis, Wuppertal 1984, for Kindheit in W. Gedichte und Prosa, Wuppertal: H.P.Sievers, 1983; new edition, Wuppertal: Nordpark Verlag, 2009. In 1998 he received the Elisabeth Frazer de Bussy Prose-Prize, served as Editor, TRANS-LIT, Journal of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German, SCALG (1998-2002) and president of SCALG (2003-2005). in 2014 he received the Lisa und Robert Kahn-Lyrikpreis (SCALG).