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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)

Deadline and submission link

The deadline for paper proposals is January 15, 2024. You can submit proposals online.

Before and after the conference

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.

Download the conference flyer.

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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

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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 SoSet 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.

Learn more about Wilson and his work.

The cover of Woolf’s draft manuscript for “Women & Fiction,” which was the first draft of her classic feminist polemic A Room of One’s Own (1929).

 

 

 

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If you will be in New York City on March 15, you can learn about Vita Sackville-West from her cousin. Yes, I’m serious.

Sponsored by the Royal Oak Foundation, the first talk in an in-person lecture series will be given by Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville on March 15 at 6 p.m. (ET) at 20 W. 44th Street, between 5th and 6th avenues. A reception and book signing will follow the lecture, which is titled “Vita Sackville-West and A Sense of Place.”

Information about the event, which I learned about from a press release, is a bit sketchy. The release did not include any information regarding cost, and the appropriate page on the Royal Oak Foundation website is not updated to include the lecture series focused on Vita. However, I did find this email address, which might be helpful for obtaining more information: lectures@royal-oak.org

About the lecture series

The lecture series will describe Vita Sackville-West’s life and illustrate the places important to Virginia Woolf’s friend and lover.

One of these places was Knole, the 365-room house in which she grew up but which she was not able to inherit due to her sex. Woolf immortalized Vita’s feelings about Knole in her 1928 novel, Orlando.

In his lectures, Sackville-West will discuss Vita’s connections to Knole, as well as Sissinghurst, a nearby castle ruin and tumbledown farm that is considered Vita’s greatest creation and most enduring legacy. Both Knole and Sissinghurst are now owned by Britain’s National Trust.

About Robert Sackville-West

Robert Sackville-West, the 13th generation of the family to live at Knole, studied history at Oxford University and went on to work in publishing. He now chairs Knole Estates, the property and investment company that, in parallel with the National Trust, runs the Sackville family’s interests at Knole.

Knole House, originally built as an archbishop’s palace but given to the Sackville family in 1603.

Rooftop view of Sissinghurst Gardens

 

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The Woolf Salon usually meets monthly on Zoom. Anyone can join the conversation.

After a four-month hiatus, the Woolf Salon Conspirators have announced that they are  starting up the 2023 Woolf Salon Project with Woolf Salon No. 23: “The Lives of the Obscure.”

Where and when

The discussion will take place on Zoom Friday, Feb. 17, at 3 p.m. ET (New York). Other time zones are listed below, but please double check them!

2 p.m. CT (Chicago)
12 p.m. PT (Los Angeles)
5 p.m. Brasilia
8 p.m. GMT (London)
9 p.m. CET (Paris)
11 p.m. MSK (Moscow)
7 a.m. AEDT Saturday (Sydney)

The essay and where to find it

The 23rd salon will feature a rich conversation about Woolf’s essay (from The Common Reader [1925]), “The Lives of the Obscure.”

You’ll find the essay in any copy of The Common Reader, in Vol. 4 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (pp. 118–45), and on Project Gutenberg.

How to join

Anyone can join the group, which usually meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.

Background on the Salon

The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

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