The organizers of the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, held in London and Sussex last July on the theme of “Woolf and Dissidence,” invite submissions for the upcoming volume in the Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers series.
The volume will add to the digital, open-access series published by Clemson University Press, and will add to the edited collections open to scholars and readers of Woolf from around the world.
The collection will focus on the theme of the 34th annual conference — “Woolf and Dissidence” — and will explore the many forms that dissent takes in Woolf’s work, continuing a conversation about the nature and context of Woolf’s dissidence, while also exploring dissident approaches and responses to Woolf’s writing.
As with previous volumes, between 25 and 30 of the hundreds of papers presented at the conference will be selected for inclusion in the volume.
Submission guidelines and deadline
Submissions should be approximately 2,000-3,500 words, including notes. All submissions must be in Word and follow the Chicago Manual Style Guide. (See further style and formatting guidance here). Authors must secure permissions for quotations or images.
Please send complete, edited papers by March 31 to H.Tyson@sussex.ac.uk.
Please note that submission does not guarantee acceptance; there will be a selection process. Any questions can be sent to Helen Tyson at H.Tyson@sussex.ac.uk.
At the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Dissidence, Anne Fernald gives a keynote address, “Dangerous Days: A Century with Clarissa Dalloway.”
Remember: the deadline for proposals for the 35th Virginia
Duncan Grant, Film of Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound, 1974. This is a digital film version of a scroll painting Grant composed in 1941. The music of Bach was meant to accompany it.
Woolf Conference, to be held in İstanbul, 24–28 June 2026, on the theme “Virginia Woolf and Sound,” is fast approaching.
The final due date is Jan. 15.
Organizers invite submissions that explore how sound—whether musical, environmental, technological, or textual—resonates throughout the work of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group.
They encourage contributions from scholars at all career stages, independent researchers, students, artists, and readers with a deep interest in Woolf’s work.
The conference will also feature 90-minute interactive workshops, and proposals in non-traditional formats that engage participants in creative or experimental ways are welcome.
Formats for proposals
Proposals are welcome for panels, roundtables, workshops, and exhibitions that take innovative, interdisciplinary, transhistorical, or collaborative approaches to the theme of “Virginia Woolf and Sound.”
Submissions in the following formats will be accepted:
Individual papers (abstract of 250 words)
Panels or roundtables (abstract of 500 words for the entire panel or roundtable)
Interactive workshops (abstract of 500 words)
Digital/material exhibition or posters (abstract of 250 words)
Non-traditional or experimental forms of presentation—including dissident, performative, or hybrid formats (abstract of 250-500 words)
Get more details
Please see the CFP for full details, and reach out to organizers at woolf2026@bilgi.edu.tr to submit your proposal or get answers to any questions.
Proposals for papers should be no more than 250 words and should specify if you wish to participate in a panel or as part of the roundtable. Please note that there will be only three slots available for the roundtable, so proposers are encouraged to also submit a proposal for a traditional panel paper.
Follow the guidelines below and at this link. Then submit your proposal via email and complete the following form by midnight Aug. 30.
If you have further questions, send them via email to mrsdallowaysymposium@st-andrews.ac.uk
A call for papers for a special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany #103 has gone out on the topic of “Woolf and Failure.”
For this special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, readers and writers are invited to think about, analyze, expose, and otherwise wallow in failure.
Failure circulates throughout Woolf’s work, and carries with it many meanings. Fears of failing or of being a failure characterize many key characters’ psyches; narratives are built on incomplete, unrealized, or failed artistic projects.
Failure is also a central presence in many of Woolf’s essays; it has a particular role in her review work, but also forms the foundation of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
That generation-defining essay is founded on Arnold Bennett’s assessment that Woolf failed to create real characters in Jacob’s Room, and contains within it Woolf’s assertion of her own failure to capture “Mrs. Brown” in telling her story.
That sanguine expression of failure in the essay jars against the fears of failing to achieve her artistic vision that Woolf records in her personal writings.
Even as Woolf explores her own worries and points out the failures of others—such as Charlotte Brontë’s anger marring Jane Eyre—she also exposes and questions the structures of expectation and the norms (both social and fictional) that determine failure and success.
Our own failures add meaning
While we can readily credit our later successes to lessons learned from earlier failures, we often experience failure in less linear and more cyclical ways. Failure surfaces at different points in our lives and work, and fears of failing and the risks involved in achieving anything other than success recur in sometimes unexpected situations.
Failure is ordinary, not extraordinary—and when we recognize failure’s ordinariness, its significance in Woolf’s work may take on new meaning.
And yet failure need not be a bummer — nor need this special issue. As Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3).
In what ways might Woolf’s work offer examples of this mode of failing or this way of understanding what failure offers?
Lastly, since each of us contends with failure in our own lives in and out of the classroom, this special issue also welcomes personal reflections on the experience of failure. Where do our understandings of failure intersect with our work with Woolf? How have our failures shaped us, and continue to shape our scholarship and teaching?
Possible approaches might include:
Defining failure in or through Woolf
Representations of failure in Woolf’s novels, short stories, and essays
Failure in Woolf’s personal writings
Failure as action (failing) or identity (being a failure)
Reading Woolf’s work through theories of failure, such as Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure
Woolfian aesthetics of failure
Failures of imagination and/or execution
Political, social, and ethical failures
Failed identities
Examinations of Woolf’s failed projects
Woolf’s assessments of her own failures and those of others
Woolf and other women writers: does Woolf’s success at infiltrating the canon mean others’ failure?
Our own experiences of failure as students, scholars, and teachers of/with Woolf
How to submit
Please submit essays of 2,500 words or fewer to Mary Wilson at mwilson4@umassd.edu by Aug. 31, 2025.
Proposals for critical papers on any topic concerning Woolf’s work are welcome. A specific panel theme may be chosen, depending on the proposals received. Please note that this panel may be virtual.
How to submit
Please submit by email a cover page with name, email address, mailing address, phone number, professional affiliation, and title of paper, and a second anonymous page containing a 250-word paper proposal, with title, to Emily M. Hinnov, ehinnov@ccsnh.edu, by Monday, Aug. 26.
