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Posts Tagged ‘Bloomsburg University’

The next generation of Woolf scholars: Part two

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Friday 29 May 2015| Leave a Comment »

Editor’s Note: Emma Slotterback is a student at Bloomsburg University who is writing a series of articles for Blogging Woolf in advance of the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, which will be held June 4-7 at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa. This is the third article in the series.

By Emma Slotterback

Robin Callahan, Bloomsburg High School English teacher

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.

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Who’s Afraid of the Virginia Woolf Reading Group? Not you!

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, tagged , , on Thursday 21 May 2015| 1 Comment »

Editor’s Note: Emma Slotterback is a student at Bloomsburg University who is writing a series of articles for Blogging Woolf in advance of the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, which will be held June 4-7 at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, Pa. This is the first article in the series.

By Emma Slotterback  

Dr. Tina Entzminger, chair of the Bloomsburg University English Department, with a book discussion group at the Emporium.

The Bookstore and the Shops at the Emporium have long been a haven for Bloomsburg’s off-beat types. Walk in on a Saturday morning and you’ll find friends in flowing skirts discussing the latest local novel, university students grabbing a cup of coffee, and children riffling through shelves of kindly-used fantasy novels.

On Thursday evenings this March and April, the Bookstore was filled with a different sort of off-beat type: students and teachers of modernist literature. Bloomsburg University English Department chair Tina Entzminger, in coordination with the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, organized a series of lectures and discussions about Virginia Woolf and her female contemporaries.

Over cups of coffee, tea, and homemade malted milk balls, Bloomsburg faculty, students, and town residents discussed writers such as Djuna Barnes, Nella Larsen, Dorothy Richardson, Gertrude Stein, and of course Virginia Woolf herself. Guided by the knowledge of the English faculty, we discussed the larger questions posed by these women’s work: how should autobiography inform our interpretation of an artist’s work? Was Stein’s ego as large as Ernest Hemingway’s or was she poking fun? Is £500 and a room of one’s own really enough to become a self-actualized artist? Some discussions highlighted male and female inequality, while other discussions focused on queer theory and its implications within a certain story.

By hosting these reading groups, we hoped to embody the spirit of Woolf’s idea of the “common reader,” appealing to both the scholar-critic and the lay reader in pursuit of the simple pleasure of reading. One of our most dedicated participants was a woman enrolled in adult literacy courses, who tested her new skills with challenging material. The connections formed in the Bookstore this spring demonstrate the ability of Virginia Woolf’s work to appeal to all readers.

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Call for papers: Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, call for papers, tagged , , , , on Monday 24 November 2014| 2 Comments »

Conference organizers have issued a call for papers on the topic, Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries for the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, sponsored by Bloomsburg University, which will take place in Bloomsburg, Penn., June 4-7, 2015. See the interactive or PDF version of the campus map.

The conference topic seeks to contextualize Virginia Woolf’s writing alongside the work of her contemporaries. This unprecedented number of women writers — experimentalists, middlebrow authors, journalists, poets, and editors — was simultaneously contributing to, as well as complicating, modernist literature. In what ways did these burgeoning communities and enclaves of women writers intersect with (or coexist alongside) Virginia Woolf?

The conference welcomes proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops from literary and interdisciplinary scholars, creative and performing artists, common readers, undergraduates, students, and teachers at all levels. Submissions should relate to Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries and may emphasize either the development of enclaves or specific female subcultures or individual writers who were contemporaneous with Virginia Woolf.

Possible paper and panel themes include:

  • The role of sexuality in the formation of communities of women writers
  • Publication and women writers
  • The Little Magazines and women writers
  • Fashion and women writers
  • The role of the new electronic mediums in the promotion of women writers
  • The rise of women writers and the anti-war movement
  • Suffragism and emerging women writers
  • Psychoanalysis and the advent of women writers
  • War and women writers

In addition to papers clearly focused on Virginia Woolf, we also welcome themes that involve any of the many women writers of the early twentieth-century including (but not limited to) Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Vera Brittain, Marianne Moore, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, Una Marson, Colette, Mary Butts, Amy Lowell, Rebecca West, Kay Boyle, Bryher, Elizabeth Bowen, and Enid Bagnold.

How to submit your proposal:

For individual papers, send a 250-word proposal. For panels of three or four people, please send a proposal title and a 250-word proposal for each paper. For roundtables and workshops, send a 250 to 500-word proposal and biographical description of each participant. Also, if you would like to chair a panel, please let us know.

High school students and undergraduates will have their own panels and seminars. Graduate students are welcome to submit proposals via the normal conference process.

Email proposal by attachment in word to Julie Vandivere at Woolf2015@bloomu.edu

Proposal deadline: Deadline for proposals is Jan. 24, 2015. NOTE: As of Jan. 25, 2015, the paper proposal deadline was extended to midnight on Jan. 31, 2015.

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