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Posts Tagged ‘Emma Slotterback’

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

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 manyhs3 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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The next generation of Woolf scholars: Part 1

Posted in 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, tagged , , , on Tuesday 26 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 second article in the series.

By Emma Slotterback

One of our goals threaded within the conference planning was to ensure that we are encouraging future25th annual conference 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.

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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  

Bloomsburg

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.Bloomsburg book group

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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