Electronic post card graphic from the Willows Tea Rooms website
What started as a discussion around a tea table in Glasgow has now become an official list sent to the VWoolf Listserv by Vara Neverow.
A group of attendees from the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held June 9-12 at the University of Glasgow, were at the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow, taking tea and mining their memory banks to come up with the complete list of 21 conferences, their organizers, and their sites. Missing just one, they queried the list, and Vara sent round the full 21.
Here is the official list of the Annual International Conferences on Virginia Woolf that have been held from 1991 through this year. Conference planners are included in parenthesis.
Anne Fernald posted the same list on Fernham and indicated the 14 conferences she attended in bold face. I am doing the same here, but as a relative newcomer, I have far fewer — just three.
You can add your count as a comment at the end of this post.
And if, like me, you didn’t make it to Glasgow, you can pick up a souvenir at the Willow Tea Rooms online shop.
- Pace University–New York City, N. Y. (Mark Hussey) 1991
- Southern Connecticut State University–New Haven (Vara Neverow) 1992
- Lincoln University–Jefferson City (Jane Lilienfeld) 1993
- Bard College–Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (Paul Connolly) 1994
- Otterbein College–Westerville, Ohio (Beth Daugherty) 1995
- Clemson University–Clemson, S. Carolina (Wayne Chapman and Elisa Sparks) 1996
- Plymouth College–Plymouth, New Hampshire (Jeanne Dubino) 1997
- St. Louis University—St. Louis, Mo. (Georgia Johnston) 1998
- University of Delaware—Newark, Delaware (Bonnie Kime Scott and Ann Ardis) 1999
- University of Maryland-Baltimore—Baltimore, Md. (Jessica Berman) 2000
- Bangor University—Bangor, Wales (Michael Whitworth) 2001
- Sonoma State University–Rohnert Park, Calif. (J.J. Wilson and Eileen Barrett) 2002
- Smith College—Northampton, Mass. (Karen Kukil et alia) 2003
- University of London—London, UK (Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari) 2004
- Lewis and Clark College—Portland, OR (Rishona Zimring) 2005
- University of Birmingham—Birmingham, UK (Kathryn Simpson, Steve Ellis et alia) 2006
- Miami University of Ohio—Miami, Ohio (Madelyn Detloff and Diana Royer) 2007
- University of Denver—Denver, Col. (Eleanor McNees) 2008
- Fordham University, Manhattan—New York City, N.Y. (Anne Fernald) 2009
- Georgetown College—Georgetown, Ky. (Kristin Czarnecki) 2010
- University of Glasgow–Glasgow, Scotland (Jane Goldman) 2011
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[…] Annual Woolf Conferences: Comment if you were there […]
The 7th conference at Plymouth State College (now Plymouth State University) was what made me become utterly devoted to Woolf and her work. I was home from college for the summer, working part-time at the PSC bookstore, and Jeanne Dubino’s energy and passion were contagious. Pretty much everybody who worked at the store volunteered to work for the conference. (None of us slept much for a few days!) At that point, I’d only read Mrs. Dalloway, and had found it beautiful and beguiling. (The film with Vanessa Redgrave had its North American premiere at that conference.) One of the many highlights for me was getting to sign in Hermione Lee, who was the keynote speaker that year, and asking her to sign my copy of her biography while I was doing her paperwork. She’d had some travel problems and was arriving late and tired, but she was terribly gracious to me, a starstruck kid. I think I spent every cent I earned at the bookstore that summer on the Woolf books we stocked.
That fall, I took a course on Woolf at the University of New Hampshire taught by Jean Kennard, where we read all of the novels except Night and Day. It was magnificent, and I’ve been reading Woolf and reading about Woolf ever since. I never would have taken that course if not for the conference, and I never would have known how to enjoy Woolf as fully without talking to so many Woolfians.
I haven’t been to another conference (I almost went to the conference at Fordham, but just couldn’t schedule it), and it would feel, for a moment at least, a bit strange to go to another because nothing could live up to the wonder of the first I attended, given how deeply it affected me. But one day…
Ah, you must live in the UK then, Lauren.
14, 16, 21!