Here are just a handful of news bits about Virginia Woolf scholars. I know there are more. So if you have one, please add it as a comment below this post. Or send it to me by clicking on the email link in the right sidebar.
Maggie Humm’s book The Bloomsbury Photographs (2024) received two honors this year. It was a finalist in the American Writing Award 2025 for Academic/Educational book, and it won the American Writing Award 2025 for photography.
Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil edited The Poems of Sylvia Plath, which is listed in the Faber Spring Catalogue and is now available for pre-order on Amazon UK. It is considered the definitive edition of Plath’s poetry.
Anne Fernald has a new book coming out in August. Her Own Voice: Eight Women Who Rewrote Life and Art tells the stories of eight radical women who responded to social oppression and helped create the modernist movement. In it, Fernald argues that the stories we read shape the lives we imagine for ourselves, and offers these stories as possible templates for living boldly and creatively.
I took a walk through Virginia Woolf’s words last week. I moved slowly, quietly. I felt reverent at the silence and the sight of her poetry flowing from the rafters in the light-filled Ellipse Gallery in the tower of the Fresno State Library.
Ane Thon Knutsen watches as conference goers walk through her “Kew Gardens” installation.
I was there early in the morning on Saturday, June 8, to experience Ane Thon Knutsen’s breathtaking installation of “Kew Gardens” at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, June 5-9 at Fresno State University.
I was among dozens of other conference participants, each of us lost in our own experience of the unique art installation, each of us feeling lucky to be there, as our view of the installation almost did not happen.
Catastrophe averted
The day before the conference began, the library’s air conditioning stopped working properly — and Fresno was in the middle of a heat wave. That meant that our visit to the installation had to be rescheduled and reformatted.
Our viewing of Ane’s brilliant art installation transformed itself from an elaborate evening arts event with refreshments, poetry, and two keynote talks to a one-hour early morning walk-through in awesome silence.
Kudos to conference organizer J. Ashley Foster for being able to turn on a dime with humor and grace. And kudos to everyone on campus — from librarian Melissa to academic deans and library and student center staff — who made the change possible.
Angling for a view
As I walked through the installation, I was struck by how much I had to use my body to view the art and read the words. I had to read with my legs, feet, torso, and arms, as well as my mind, eyes, and hands.
Sitting to read Woolf’s words.
I had to sway, walk, crouch, take a step backwards, step sideways, step forwards. I also had to stand still and wait patiently for the bright morning sunlight to change slightly and for the strips to still themselves in the shifting air so I could read Woolf’s words.
I watched as other viewers did the same. They stood still. They craned their necks upwards. They crouched. They bent. They sat down. Some even lay down, quietly giggling as the words wafted over their heads and their bodies, ruffled by the wispy breeze generated by weak air conditioning and the movements of those walking by.
About the “Kew Gardens” installation
J. Ashley Foster, conference organizer and associate professor at Fresno State University, and Jane Goldman, reader at the University of Glasgow, at the installation viewing.
Ane spent five years planning her adaptation of Woolf’s short story. It consists of 1,514 letterpress-printed sheets on translucent 18 gms kozo, a Japanese paper.
The sheets are arranged in 94 chains. each 18 sheets long, and they include all the words and punctuation marks that compose Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens.” The printed words follow the colors named in the story, changing as each color is mentioned.
Ane explains the installation as an “organic book allowing you to walk through the pages, like insects in a flowerbed.”
Later, after the viewing, she said the installation no longer felt like it was just hers, as she had now shared it with dozens of people who love Woolf’s words.
About Ane Thon Knutsen
This was not Ane’s first exhibit focused on Woolf’s words. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. She has won numerous awards for her work and owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.
Ane gave an artist talk on Friday evening during the conference.
In “Printed Works,” she adapted a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories. The exhibit focused on Woolf’s poetic short stories “Blue” and “Green.” The printed pages were collected and are being stored in book form in FGCU Bradshaw Library’s Archives and Special Collections.
Virginia Woolf’s numerous experiences with illness led her to write the essay On Being Ill, published in 1930 by the Hogarth Press. Inspired by this work and the coronavirus, Norwegian typesetter Ane Thon Knutsen has turned her spontaneous homage to the essay into book form.
Working from her private letterpress studio at home, Ane started a third. She printed one sentence from “On Being Ill” on one sheet of paper every day. Her project ran from March 23 to Aug. 29, 2020, and she shared those pages on Instagram. She also shared her thoughts about the project with Blogging Woolf.
Through this process, she shaped a diary in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed for research on pandemics by creating an artist book.
The book merges Woolf’s sentences with with my reflections on covid, pandemics, isolation, escaping reality through literature, waiting, time, art, love, protests, feminism, typesetting, printing, family, small stuff, big stuff. – Ane
The publication also contains reflections on teaching during the pandemic in the spring of 2021, along with insights and works by master’s students in graphic design and illustration at The Oslo National Academy of The Arts, using Woolf’s essay as a mirror for their own pandemic experiences.
The digital book edition
With an introduction by Mark Hussey, the book is available as a digital book edition of 150. It is now available through several independent bookshops, which are handling distribution. They include the following:
The publication is supported with research funds from The Oslo National Academy of The Arts. Graphic design was done by Tiril Haug Johne and Victoria Meyer.
Ane expresses special thanks to the Oslo National Academy of the Arts Class of 2022: Araiz Mesanza, Embla Sunde Myrva, Kristine Lie Øverland Emil Holmberg Lewe, Ruth Emilie Rustad, Nicolo Groenier, her former professor Alan Mackenzie-Robinson, former president of the International Virginia Woolf Society Dr. Benjamin Hagen, the Woolf community, her husband Truls and her son Pil.
Ane Thon Knutsen in her home printshop with a volume of On Being Ill, her pandemic project originally shared on Instagram.
About Ane Thon Knutsen
Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.
Ane Thon Knutsen at her exhibition “Printed Works: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf” at the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jun3 8-11, 2023.
In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapted a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories. The exhibit focused on Woolf’s poetic short stories “Blue” and “Green.” The printed pages were collected and are being stored in book form in FGCU Bradshaw Library’s Archives and Special Collections.
More coming up
In addition, Ane will display another installation, Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” May 16 – June 11 for the 33rd International Virginia Woolf Conference. The adaptation of Woolf’s short story consists of 1,514 letterpress-printed sheets of kozo.
According to Ane, it is an “organic book allowing you to walk through the pages, like insects in a flowerbed.”
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:
Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Ane Thon Knutsen is at it again — at combining Virginia Woolf and the letterpress, that is.
This time, the Oslo Academy of the Arts professor has debuted her installation, “Printed Words: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf,” at University Archives and Special Collections at the Florida Gulf Coast University library.
In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapts a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories.
“Knutsen’s artistic research aims to point out the influence typography, particularly typesetting, might have on the content of the text. It speaks to the power of designing and publishing one’s own work,” notes the FGCU Special Collections and Archives website.
Her first Woolf project: a book
In “A Printing Press of One’s Own,” which premiered at the 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf” at the University of Reading, England, in 2017, Ane produced a hand-set volume that includes Ane’s personal essay about her experience finding a space of her own in which she could pursue her passion — typesetting.
Ane Thon Knutsen with her hand-printed volume introduced at the 2017 Woolf conference, “A Printing Press of One’s Own”
According to Ane, “The book is an essay referring to A Room of One’s Own (1929) by Virginia Woolf. The essay reflects upon women’s role in letterpress, and the importance of a room of one’s own in artistic practices.
“In this book I am investigating the first books printed by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, both in practice and in the written ‘dialogue’ between Virginia Woolf and myself, as we are both self-taught typesetters.”
Her second: up on the walls
In the winter of 2019, Ane had a major installation of Woolf’s first short story, “The Mark on the Wall,” (1917) in Kunstnernes Hus, an art institution in the centre of Oslo.
As described by Nell Toemen, who visited the exhibit and shared her thoughts with Blogging Woolf, Woolf’s story was “handprinted on I don’t know how many papers, white and off-white, neatly arranged so as to fill all the walls. If you would walk the room in eleven rounds you would be able to read the whole story. Reading it this way is an absolutely different experience than reading the story in a book.”
Page 2 of the “On Being Ill” project
Her third: via Instagram
In March of 2020, as lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, Ane used her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill,“ Woolf’s 1930 essay.
At the time, she said she was using her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill” “until we can go back to normal. I hope I will not make it through, as we’re counting about 140 sentences, and the paper is restricted to leftovers from my stock.”
About Ane Thon Knutsen
Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.
