And next week, The Center for Fiction will welcome Seshagiri for a conversation with Woolf scholar Anne Fernald on the book, which is considered Woolf’s first work of experimental fiction.
The talk is available in person or as a livestream on Thursday, Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. EDT.
If you live in or near New York City, you may want to head over to 115 Lafayette St. in Brooklyn to attend in person at a cost of $10. If not, register for the livestream; it’s just $5.
The event, sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society, includes 12 panel sessions and a keynote by Derek Ryan of the University of Kent and continues the theme of the 2023 conference: “Virginia Woolf and Ecologies.” Ryan’s keynote is titled “Virginia Woolf and the Pyrocene: Fire Ecologies.”
Dates and times
The conference begins at 11:30 a.m. EDT Oct. 20 and ends at 4 p.m. EDT Oct. 22. Please remember to check local times.
What it costs
Registration costs $20, plus a small transaction fee, with proceeds going towards the Suzanne Bellamy Travel Fund, which supports travel to the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf next June.
How to register
Register via Eventbrite. You will find an outline of the symposium schedule on the registration page, where the full program schedule will be made available soon.
You should receive a confirmation message upon registering, and you will be added to an email list to which organizers will send the requisite Zoom links as the dates of the symposium draw near.
Get more information
If you have any questions about registration or other IVWS business, write to vwoolfsociety@gmail.com. Direct other questions about the symposium program to woolfecologies@gmail.com.
Note: The deadline for paper proposals has been extended to Jan. 31, 2024.
California State University, Fresno, in Fresno, Calif., will host the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: “Woolf, Modernity, Technology,” June 6-9, 2024, and the call for papers has gone out.
Call for papers
Organizers invite paper, panel, workshop, and exhibition proposals that engage with the 2024 theme, “Woolf, Modernity, Technology.” Technological innovation regularly inspires a social, cultural, artistic, and political revolution.
Though evolving artificial intelligence programs are the most recent iteration of this, epistemological and ontological crises underwritten by technics reverberate through modernity. This conference embraces the expansive, cosmopolitan, and transnational turn in modernist studies to trace the interaction of networks with the aesthetics, techniques, and vocabulary of modernisms and the way in which these modernisms are indebted to modernity’s technological ruptures and innovations.
Accelerating technological climates force us to ask, what does it mean to be human? If a machine can make and replicate art and literature, and possibly even innovate in the arts, where does that leave space for us as creators and contributors? Do human-agent interactions redefine relations again, redoubling what Woolf said in 1924, that “All human relations have shifted,” which leads to “a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature”?
Where do we locate the nexus of the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” that Woolf wrote about in To The Lighthouse? Is it (can it be?) contained in the output of an algorithm?
“Woolf, Modernity, Technology” brings into relief relations and tensions between literature, art, technology, modernity, and humanity that modernism broadly, and Woolf specifically, has long negotiated. Here, we define both modernity and technology in their most expansive and loosest expressions: modernity invites historical, political, economic, cultural, and theoretical approaches – among many others – and technology invites thinking on technê and technics, technology, technicity, technique, tool, on art, writing, and praxis as technologies.
Possible topics might include: -gender, race, sexualities, and relationships in the rise of modernity and an age of innovation -modernity and/or technology and ontology, metaphysics, ethics, epistemology -technê, tech, technics -technology’s and modernity’s relation to nature or the natural -digital humanities, critical digital pedagogy, or pedagogical experiments with technology -writing, communication, or travel technologies -extended, augmented, and virtual realities -aesthetic innovation, poiesis, art and artistic production, art and AI -technologies of peace -technologies of war, imperialist expansion, or capitalism -explorations of what it means to be human, animal, or machine -medical humanities and scientific approaches -technologies of printing and publishing -neural networks, network theory, collaboration, loops, and circuits -human-agent interaction -modernist technologies and temporality
While this list offers suggestions or possible entrances into a conversation, we welcome all ideas and approaches and seek to traverse disciplines and time periods. Anyone interested in presenting is invited to submit a proposal for a paper, panel, roundtable, workshop, or exhibition on Woolfian or Bloomsbury topics.
Exhibitions could be digital (as in digital humanities projects) or could include displays of crafts or material objects related to the conference theme. Interactive workshops of 90 minutes will also be offered throughout the conference and we welcome submissions for non-traditional formats.
Please specify in your proposal if you are submitting:
An interactive workshop (abstract of 500 words)
Panel or Roundtable (abstract of 500 words for the entire panel or roundtable)
A paper (abstract of 250 words)
A digital/material object exhibition or display (abstract of 250 words)
A non-traditional form of presenting (abstract of 250-500 words)
Pre- and post-conference activities will be held June 5 and 9, with trips to Yosemite National Park and Sequoia/Kings Canyon.
Got questions?
Email conference organizer Ashley Foster, associate professor at CSU, Fresno, at foster@csufresno.edu or at woolf2024@mail.fresnostate.edu with any questions.
All Woolfians, whether in Turkey or not, are welcome to join the inaugural event of the newly formed Virginia Woolf Society Turkey for an online talk and the sharing of ideas for talks, blog posts, and/or projects on Virginia Woolf and her connection to Turkey.
When: Tuesday, July 4, at 5 p.m. BST Who: Dr Lee Okan from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA What: “Time’s Fluidity: Analyzing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando through Henri Bergson’s Philosophy of Duration” How: Register FREE on Eventbrite.
This free online talk will explore the use of time and its intertwining with gender and identity, particularly in relation to Henri Bergson’s theories of time and duration. Join in to see how Woolf defies traditional conceptions of time.
For further information, please contact: virginiawoolfturkiye@ gmail.com and follow the group on Twitter: @VWoolfTurkiye
At the 2019 Literature Cambridge course “Virginia Woolf and Gardens,” Kabe Wilson explained his art project in which he cut out the words from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to create the 145 pages of his novella Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So.
Kabe Wilson is launching a new multimedia work on To the Lighthouse at the University of Sussex on May 16.
The work “covers a series of archival quests about my childhood holidays, which then link up with Woolf and Bell’s own holidays, as well as their collaboration on To the Lighthouse itself, before developing into an elegy to all three,” Wilson explains.
The culmination of his residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies, the multi-media presentation centers around the story of the 10 paintings of Brighton and Sussex that Wilson produced during the 2020 lockdown period, and the exciting art history discovery that led to one of them becoming the cover image of a new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
A free one-day event in two parts
Part One: Modernist Archives Workshop at The Keep, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., with archivists, art and literary historians, followed by lunch. Includes some connections to the Bloomsbury group. Registration is essential due to space restrictions.
Part Two: Film Screening of “Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey Through 100 Archives,” followed by a Q & A with Wilson and chaired by Centre for Modernist Studies Directors Helen Tyson and Hope Wolf at the University of Sussex, Jubilee building, Jubilee Lecture Theatre 144, 3 p.m. – 4:30 or 5 p.m.
Get more information and register
More information is available here. Both events are free, but registration is required. Register here for one or both.
More about Kabe Wilson
Cover of the new edition of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that features Wilson’s photo.
For his first Woolf-related project, Wilson rearranged Woolf’s words into his novella titled Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So. Set 80 years after the publication of Woolf’s essay, it tells the story of a young woman’s radical challenge to literary conservatism in the elitist environment of the University of Cambridge.
He then turned his work into a piece of art, a 4 x 13-ft. sheet of paper displaying the novella’s 145 pages, with each word cut out, individually, from a copy of A Room of One’s Own, and reformed to duplicate the novella.
