Each year at the Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Cecil Woolf Publishers of London introduces several new monographs in their Bloomsbury Heritage Series and distributes a new catalogue of their publications.
The series of monographs is published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s nephew, Cecil Woolf, under the general editorship of Cecil’s wife, the acclaimed biographerJean Moorcroft Wilson. Following in the tradition of the Hogarth Essays, these booklets range in length from eight to 80 pages and embrace the ‘Life, Works and Times of members of the Bloomsbury Group.’
Natural Connections: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield by Bonnie Kime Scott
`Eternally in yr Debt’: the Personal and Professional Relationship Between Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Robins by Hilary Newman
Saxon Sydney-Turner: The Ghost of Bloomsbury by Todd Avery
Virginia Woolf as Memoirist: ‘I am Made and Remade Continually’ by Alice Lowe
Mistress of the Brush and Madonna of Bloomsbury, the Art of Vanessa Bell: a Biographical Sketch and Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Writings on Vanessa Bell by Suellen Cox
Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Septimus Smith, Modernist and War Poet: A Closer Reading by Vara S. Neverow
The show of works on paper attracted more than 400 submissions, with 49 chosen for the exhibit, including Susie Lilly, a former women’s studies student of mine at the University of Akron, where she graduated with a degree in art.
The opening and awards presentation will be 6-8 p.m. Thursday, June 4, at The Gallery at Greenly Center, 50 East Main St., Bloomsburg. The exhibit runs through June 30.
Those chosen are: TBettina Badr • Laura Bernstein • Mischa Brown • Deborah Bruns-Thomas • Dylan Collins • Laura Collins • Ozlem Habibe Mutaf Buyukarman • Maria DiMauro • Elaine M. Erne • Nicole Foran • Anita Ford • Leah Gallant • Lori Glavin • Stephanie Haughton • Craig Hill • Susie Lilley • Erika Lizée • Yvonne Love • Janet Maher • Jo Margolis • Marcella Marsella • Tonia Matthews • Alberto Meza • Chieko Murasugi • Jacqueline-Dee Parker • Frank Pulaski • Dana Scott • Carolyn Sheehan • David Thomas • Rhonda Thomas-Urdang • Maxene White • Jacqueline Young
Robin Callahan, Bloomsburg High School English teacher
As an aspiring high school teacher, I believe our involvement with the Bloomsburg Area High School and the Berwick Area High School is one of the most exciting relationships we have developed due to the conference. Continuing our effort towards building a new generation of Woolf scholars, we came up with another idea that would not only build connections within our town, but also encourage young people to read and write about Woolf.
We reached out to two local high schools and connected with two high school English teachers. We also collaborated with Dr. Michael Sherry who was previously an English professor at Bloomsburg University. Our goal was to extend an invitation to high school students to expand their knowledge on Woolf and develop papers that could be presented at the conference.
Megan Hicks, work study student
Both the teachers and the students were thrilled about this opportunity and began planning accordingly. We sent the teachers multiple lesson plans that could be used to teach Woolf and Dr. Sherry provided the students with copies of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The students began reading and discussing the book and each student came up with his or her own paper proposal.
Similar to what we did with the undergraduates, we took the students’ papers and sorted them into panels. These panels are also going to run alongside scholarly panels. To prepare for this, work study students such as myself and Megan Hicks have taken multiple trips to the local Bloomsburg Area High School to work with these students. During these trips, Megan and I would discuss the conference and ease any public speaking related anxieties the students might have. During one of our visits, we formed two small group of students and each student practiced reading his or her paper out loud. Practicing gave Megan and me the opportunity to give the students constructive criticism and praise.
The high school students will be presenting on Thursday and will be encouraged to attend all of the conference related events on that day. Many students have expressed interest in attending many scholarly panels. After reading and writing on Woolf for an entire semester, these students are extremely excited to connect their schoolwork with outside experience and be able to develop new ways of thinking after hearing the ideas of others. This aspect of the conference is providing young people with experiences that will further their love for modernism and Woolf, as well as paving the way for the future generation of Woolf scholars.
On Twitter, I learned of a rare find in the basement of the Bristol Museum of a booklet printed for the Fry memorial exhibition held at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in 1935. It contains the text of the exhibition’s opening speech written and delivered by Woolf. “After further research, it appears this booklet is one of the most sought after publications by the writer,” wrote Fay Curtis in her museum post. “The print run was just 125, which is why they are so rare today, and the curator at the time had several to give away. Thankfully for us, he slipped one into the exhibition file – where it remained for eighty years. We have now removed it from the old file in the basement and entered it into the Fine Art collection.”
On Facebook, I learned that a copy of the exhibit booklet is available at the University of Toronto Libraries.
Facebook also told me Virginia Woolf is on the move at Victoria Library. Here’s the post, which pictured the small Woolf doll on a picnic blanket in front of a college building: “Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is on the move. She left her secure box in the E.J. Pratt Library for the summer and will be visiting places on campus. Her first stop is in front of the Victoria College building.” The Woolf doll is actually listed in the library catalog.
One of our goals threaded within the conference planning was to ensure that we are encouraging future generations of Woolf scholars. With this in mind, we extended our call for papers invitation to not only the Bloomsburg University undergraduates, but also undergraduates across the country. To do this, we emailed a number of universities and asked if their undergraduates would be interested in presenting papers at the conference. We received excellent feedback from faculty and students, and received a number of undergraduate abstracts. Bloomsburg University students were also thrilled to hear about this opportunity and immediately started working on paper proposals.
After accepting a number of undergraduate abstracts, we were able to develop undergraduate panels that are going to run alongside the scholarly panels. Like the scholarly panels, the undergraduate students will be introduced, will read their papers, and then have a free-form discussion afterwards with other undergraduates as well as other conference attendees. The undergraduates were also given the opportunity to chair other undergraduate panels. We believe this to be a very enriching experience, especially for those that have never attended an international, scholarly event such as this.
Each undergraduate panel will be providing a space for developing ideas and for demonstrating the knowledge these students have gained throughout their undergraduate experiences. Some of the Bloomsburg undergraduate students were enrolled in English courses over the last semester that included Virginia Woolf and her female contemporaries within their course schedule. Many students read these modernists and were able to take those class discussions further with this conference.
Eleven different universities will be represented within the undergraduate corner of the conference and this incredible group of undergraduates have been communicating since they received their acceptances. Some have contacted each other about rooming together, while others have held meetings with each other to discuss their papers and practice their public speaking. The conference is able to encourage these students to build relationships among one another as well as branch out and introduce themselves to scholars and graduate students. The intellectual experience these students will gain cannot be paralleled and we hope it will encourage them to continue on with their studies of modernism, feminism, Woolf, and her female contemporaries.
