Blogging Woolf

Marking 100 years since the end of the First World War and 80 years since the publication of Three Guineas, the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, invites papers addressing the dual theme of Europe and Peace. Download the call for papers.

From the ‘prying’, ‘insidious’ ‘fingers of the European War’ that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs. Dalloway to Woolf’s call to ‘think peace into existence’ during the Blitz in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, questions of war and peace pervade her writings. They are also central to Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle, exemplified in John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Peace at Once and Leonard Woolf’s Quack, Quack!

While seeking proposals that address the European contexts and cultures of modernism between wars, we also encourage exploration of how these writings can help us think through what it might mean to create peace in Europe today amid various political, humanitarian, economic and environmental crises.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Bloomsbury and pacifism
• Literature of the First and Second World Wars
• The Spanish Civil War
• The Armistice and Paris Peace Conference
• Three Guineas and its legacies
• International/transnational/cosmopolitan Woolf
• Bloomsbury and the European avant-garde
• Feminism, queer studies and LGBT+ politics
• Empire, race and ethnicity
• Woolf and continental philosophy/theory
• European translations of Woolf and Bloomsbury
• Ecological/environmental/economic crises
• Violence, trauma and fascism
• Bloomsbury and classical antiquity
• Woolf across visual art, film, dance and music
• Travel writing and European journeys

Abstracts of a maximum of  200 words for single papers and 500 words for panels should be sent to vwoolf2018@gmail.com by 1 February 2018.