On the conference website are submission guidelines, hotel information, information about traveling to Vancouver, and a description of a post-conference tour.
Helen Wussow, conference organizer, announced that the following individuals have agreed to provide plenary addresses:
Dr. Rosemary Ashton, Quain Emeritus Profesor and Honorary Fellow, University College, London
Dr. Paul Delany, Professor Emeritus, English, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Christine Froula, Professor, English, Comparative Literature Studies, and Gender Studies, Northwestern University
Dr. Mary Ann Gillies, Professor, English, Simon Fraser University
Dr. Sonita Sarker, Professor, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and English, Macalester College
Dr. Jane Stafford, Associate Professor, School of English, Film, Theatre, and Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington
She also said that on Friday, June 7, conference registrants will have the opportunity to visit the Bill Reid Gallery in downtown Vancouver and have hors d’oeuvres based on Pacific Northwest aboriginal cuisine. Mike Robinson, the Gallery’s executive director, will provide an introductory lecture to Pacific Northwest aboriginal art and the work of Bill Reid, a master artist of Haida heritage.
“Status Updates,” a Jan. 11 essay in the New York Times about how many live and dead authors appear on Facebook and Twitter, was of particular interest to me because it closed with a reference to Virginia Woolf.
Just as Blogging Woolf contributor Alice Lowe focuses on Woolf sightings in contemporary fiction, I pay particular attention to sightings of my favorite author in social media and other online venues.
Essay author Julianna Baggott notes that multiple folks have adopted Woolf’s persona, (including yours truly via Facebook). Here’s what she has to say:
In many cases, I didn’t find just one person who had taken on a dead author’s voice. With Virginia Woolf, for example, multiple avatars fill the page, some 60 tweeting Virginia Woolfs. They tweet in Spanish, in Arabic, in Italian, in languages I don’t even recognize, all these Woolfs holding one Woolf’s words alive. One Woolf recently quoted the original: “What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate! #TheVoyageOut #RichardDalloway.
It holds true, maybe now more than ever. Amid the barrage of social media, each of us is still somehow alone. Yet I find comfort in Woolf’s tweets, echoing across our solitary icebergs.
Personal details of Virginia Woolf’s final years are available to the public for the first time after the University of Sussex acquired this engagement diary and seven more at a Sotheby’s auction.
The University of Sussex has purchased Virginia Woolf’s small pocket engagement diaries that she used to detail her personal life from 1930 to 1941. The last entry is for March 28, 1941, which is written in pencil by Leonard Woolf, and simply states “Died.”
The University of Sussex has purchased Virginia Woolf’s small pocket engagement diaries that she used to detail her personal life from 1930 to 1941. The last entry is for March 28, 1941, which is written in pencil by Leonard Woolf, and simply states “Died.”
The diaries briefly record Woolf’s meetings with contemporaries, including E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot, along with visits to her artist sister Vanessa Bell. They also indicate when she would be staying at her home Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex.
Some of the diaries include pencil lines through several dates and appointments, accompanied by the word “Bed,”indicating periods when she was experiencing health problems.
The University’s Special Collections has an extensive collection of materials related to Woolf. It bought the diaries to complement the Monks House Papers, which were donated to the University’s Special Collections in 1972 and contain Woolf’s correspondence from other writers, family, friends, admirers and publishers. They also include her reading notebooks, drafts of essays and typescripts of some of her works, proofed and corrected in her own hand.
The Monks House Papers fall into three groups: letters, manuscripts and press-cuttings. There is documentation of Woolfs career from her earliest journalism to what was possibly her final short fiction, The Watering Place, a two-page manuscript which draws on a diary entry of 1941 written shortly before her suicide.
Fiona Courage, special collections manager, said: “The collection very much represents Woolf’s ‘everyday’ life in the same way that the pocket engagement diaries do. As with the engagement diaries, our collections relate to Woolf as an individual rather than her public persona of novelist, reviewer and essayist.
“The activities recorded in these engagement diaries may not have found their way into her more detailed daily diaries, but are significant in terms of her daily life, her social circle and her physical and mental state. The diaries also complement a set of appointment diaries belonging to Leonard Woolf, and held within his papers at the University.”
She added that these diaries have never been made publically available for research.“By acquiring them we can now make them accessible to scholars, enthusiasts and the general public.”
The University was able to raise the £60,000 necessary to buy the diaries with support from the V&A/MLA Purchase Grant Fund*, the Friends of the National Libraries and a number of individual donors.
Besides the Monk’s House Papers and the small engagement diaries, the University of Sussex Special Collections holds the following related materials:
Leonard Woolf Papers
Charleston Papers
Birrell Papers
Nicolson Papers
A.O. Bell Papers
Quentin Bell Papers
Emery Collection
Maria Jackson Letters
Mrs Woolf and the Servants: research papers
Additional biographical and literary manuscripts of Virginia Woolf that were at Monk’s House are now in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in New York. The Berg Collection holds the largest collection of Woolf manuscripts in the world.
This is the last call to submit a panel topic for the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, scheduled for Jan. 9-12, 2014. The deadline was slightly extended due to individuals having the flu.
The International Virginia Woolf Society will have one guaranteed panel, and the group can submit one additional panel, as it did for the 2013 MLA Convention in Boston with the Katherine Mansfield Society. It may also (as for this past MLA with the Joseph Conrad Society) collaborate with another Allied Organization and submit a third panel.
Organizers would like to continue the tradition of submitting multiple excellent panel proposals. Note that this is a call for panels, not individual paper proposals. Please submit only one topic.
What you should submit:
a 35-word description (word count includes title)
the name(s) and contact information of the proposed organizer(s). [email addresses required.] Note: It can be quite helpful to have more than one organizer, especially if seasonal illness strikes
Submit to Leslie Kathleen Hankins electronically at lhankins@cornellcollege.edu or by mail. Electronic submissions are strongly preferred. The topic line should read: Woolf MLA 2014.
Deadline: Jan. 15 for the receipt of proposals.
The IVWS will vote on the resulting proposals in January, so as to meet MLA deadlines.
If you wish to propose your own special session outside of the IVWS process, please go to the MLA website, http://www.mla.org.
