Blogging Woolf

Conference organizers have issued a call for papers on the topic, Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries for the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, sponsored by Bloomsburg University, which will take place in Bloomsburg, Penn., June 4-7, 2015. See the interactive or PDF version of the campus map.

The conference topic seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of her contemporaries. This unprecedented number of women writers — experimentalists, middlebrow authors, journalists, poets, and editors — was simultaneously contributing to, as well as complicating, modernist literature. In what ways did these burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersect with (or coexist alongside) Virginia Woolf?

The conference welcomes proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops from literary and interdisciplinary scholars, creative and performing artists, common readers, undergraduates, students, and teachers at all levels. Submissions should relate to Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries and may emphasize either the development of enclaves or specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf.

Possible paper and panel themes include:

• The role of sexuality in the formation of communities of women writers
• Publication and women writers
• The Little Magazines and women writers
• Fashion and women writers
• The role of the new electronic mediums in the promotion of women writers
• The rise of women writers and the anti-war movement
• Suffragism and emerging women writers
• Psychoanalysis and the advent of women writers
• War and women writers

In addition to papers clearly focused on Virginia Woolf, we also welcome themes that involve any of the many women writers of the early twentieth-century including (but not limited to) Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Vera Brittain, Marianne Moore, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Una Marson, Colette, Mary Butts, Amy Lowell, Rebecca West, Kay Boyle, Bryher, Elizabeth Bowen, and Enid Bagnold.

How to submit your proposal:

For individual papers, send a 250-word proposal. For panels of three or four people, please send a proposal title and a 250-word proposal for each paper. For roundtables and workshops, send a 250 to 500-word proposal and biographical description of each participant. Also, if you would like to chair a panel, please let us know.

High school students and undergraduates will have their own panels and seminars. Graduate students are welcome to submit proposals via the normal conference process.

Email proposal by attachment in word to Julie Vandivere at Woolf2015@bloomu.edu

Proposal deadline: Deadline for proposals is Jan. 24, 2015. NOTE: As of Jan. 25, 2015, the paper proposal deadline was extended to midnight on Jan. 31, 2015.