Blogging Woolf

Inspiring. Insightful. Intimate. Those are three words I could use to describe the four days of Virginia Woolf and Ethics, the 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, which ran from June 9-12.

Held remotely on Zoom for the second year in a row and hosted by Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, with Amy Smith as organizer, the conference brought together around 270 Woolf scholars from around the globe, including Brazil, the Netherlands, Norway, Candada, the UK, and the US.

Links to share

I took lots of notes. Sadly, I don’t have the time or the energy to share them all. Instead, I’ll list just a few online resources that some of the presenters and participants shared with us. Readers, feel free to add yours in the comments section below.

Here goes.

• Bernardine Evaristo on Mrs Dalloway, a BBC Radio 3 broadcast
• In The Modernist Review: “On Being Still” by Kabe Wilson. This piece is his diaristic account of his attempt to engage with Bloomsbury modernism over the lockdown period and against the backdrop of the global Black Lives Matter protests.
• Black and British: A Forgotten History on BBC iPlayer. Note: BBC iPlayer only works in the UK.
• Women and Letterpress Printing 1920–2020: Gendered Impressions by ClaireBattershill. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
• Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras. Coach House Books.
• Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf. First edition as a PDF from the Modernist Archives website.

Favorite quote and rave reviews

And here is one of my favorite quotes from the conference. There were many more, but this is the only one I managed to get down on paper verbatim.

It comes from Ane Thon Knutsen, of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway, who presented “On Being Ill – A letterpress printed Covid-19 diary.”

You have no control over what happens when you read books. And it’s magical. – Ane Thon Knutsen

Ane, along with many other presenters, got rave reviews. One was Beth Rigel Daugherty, whose brilliant and heartfelt final plenary, “On the Ethics of Teaching: Virginia Woolf’s Essays,” awed participants and brought them to tears.

Below is just one of the many information-rich PowerPoint slides Beth shared in her talk. It lists some of the Woolf essays that informed her 36 years of teaching at Otterbein University and warned her against preaching to her students, a caveat she took to heart.

Recently retired, Beth’s latest project is a book for Edinburgh University Press — Virginia Woolf’s Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist (2022).