Conference logo designed by Farrah Alkhadra
After four years, we finally met. In person. Elbow to elbow. Face to face. Sitting together. Dining together. Walking together. Rooming together. Collaborating together. Smiling together. Kvetching together. It was bliss.
It was the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 8-11 at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla., with its theme of Virginia Woolf and Ecologies.
And it was the first in-person gathering of this bonded but welcoming group of Woolf scholars from around the globe since the 2019 conference, Virginia Woolf and Social Justice, at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The organizer and the panels
This year, Laci Mattison was our leader, planning and orchestrating a conference that met — and went beyond — everyone’s expectations. The associate professor & B.A. English program co-Coordinator of the Department of Language & Literature at FGCU planned a conference that included panels ranging from “Vernal Woolf” to “Liquid Woolf” to “Mindfulness and Woolf” and everything in between — including a hands-on craft worshop.
The plenaries
Then there were the plenaries — five of them! They included:
-
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, widow of Cecil Woolf, Leonard and Virginia’s nephew, gave a talk on “The Legacy of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press: Through Family Eyes.”
The legendary Jean Moorcroft Wilson talking about “The Legacy of Leonard and VirginiaWoolf’s Hogarth Press: Through Family Eyes” with her usual wit, whimsy, and brilliance.
- Asali Solomon talking with great humor about her latest novel, The Days of Afrekete, which incorporates themes of Mrs. Dalloway and more.
- Claire Colebrook on “Ecology and Archive,” an ethereal topic way over my head.
- Jessica Martell and Vicki Tromanhauser on “Virginia Woolf’s Food Ecologies,” taking apart the British Empire’s industrial food production and adding Woolf’s use of food in her writing.
- “Sensuous Pedagogies: A Roundtable,” with Ben Hagen, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Catherine Hollis, Mark Hussey, and Vicki Tromanhauser. This roundtable explored the assignments in Hagen’s The Sensuous Pedagogies of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence in terms of teaching and learning as problems of sensation, emotion or intensity.
The exhibit
Ane Thon Knutsen with her exhibit of “Blue and Green” at University Archives and Special Collections in the Bradshaw Library at FGCU.
Ane Thon Knutsen, a Norwegian artist and designer who specializes in letterpress, exhibited her most recent large-scale work, which brought Woolf’s short piece “Blue and Green,” published in Monday and Tuesday (1921) into the room and up on the walls. More on this later.
Recent virtual conferences
Between the 2019 in-person conference, the 29th, and this year’s came these:
- 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance, held virtually at the University of South Dakota in Vermilion, South Dakota, in 2021. This conference was postponed from 2020 due to Covid.
- 31st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Ethics, held virtually at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.
On the way to dinner out, a group of Woolfians spotted a rainbow and happily posed with it.
Happy faces from around the globe dining out in Ft. Myers, Fla.
This year’s Woolf Players ready to read their favorite Woolf passages at the traditional Saturday evening banquet.
