Conference Agenda and Streaming Links
Saturday, June 11
Links to sessions are embedded in their headings.
8:00am-9:00am: Breakfast and Coffee Hour
9:00am-10:30am: Session H
H-S1. Mrs. Dalloway: Consciousness, Communion, Community
Chair: Paulina Pająk
Chat Moderator: Reilly Smith
Georgy Liseyev (HSE University, Russia), “Emotional Communities in Mrs. Dalloway”
Mridula Sharma (University of Delhi, University of Glasgow, India & Scotland), “Ethics and Authority in Mrs. Dalloway: Contradiction, Communion, and Reading”
Tong He (University of Texas at Dallas, U.S.), “Street-consciousness and Female Subjectivity in Mrs. Dalloway”
H-S2. Eco Sense & Sensibility
Chair: Shilo McGiff
Chat Moderator: Valérie Favre
Savina Stevanato (Roma Tre University, Italy), “‘everything is interconnected’: Woolf’s Ethical Craftsmanship”
Stefano Rozzoni (University of Bergamo, Justus Liebig Universität Gießen, Italy & Germany), “Land Ethic(s) and The Land (1926): Trajectories across Sackville-West, Woolf, and Issues of Human-Nonhuman Relationality”
Anna Potoczny (Independent Scholar, Poland), “‘Anon,’ To the Lighthouse, and Posthumanist Authorship”
H-S3. Terminal Aesthetics
Chair: Angela Harris
Chat Moderator: Jeanette McVicker
Marlene Dirschauer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany), “Re-thinking death and creativity in Woolf’s poetics of water”
Alexandra Huang-Kokina (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK), “The Ethics of Wagnerian Death in The Voyage Out and Jacob’s Room”
Lee Okan (Independent Scholar, U.S. & Wales, UK), “Mrs. Dalloway: The Ethics of Time and Suicide”
H-S4. On Being Ill - A letterpress printed COVID-19 diary
Chair: Amy Smith
Ane Thon Knutsen, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway
10:30-11:00: Short break
11:00am-12:30pm: Session I
I-S1. Flush: Canine Relations
Chair: Peter Adkins
Chat Moderator: Adam Nemmers
Diana Royer (Miami University, U.S.), “‘A dog has a character just as we have’: The Ethical and Non-Ethical Treatment of Non-Human Animals in Woolf’s Fiction”
Ollie Case (University of Worcester, England, UK), “Cross-Species Translations in Flush”
Sabrina Nacci (Clark University, U.S.), “Non-Verbal Communication Between Humans and Animals in Flush”
I-S2. Images, Texts, and Textiles: Woolf & Contemporary Art
Chair: Catherine Paul
Chat Moderator: Victoria Juarez
Melissa Johnson (Illinois State University, U.S.), “‘What he said and she said and make poetry’: reading, writing, and stitching Woolf Words”
Ella Bucknell (Author and Artist, England, UK), “‘A Sketch of the Past’: Illustration as Biography and the Ethics of Life Writing”
Leah Mackin (Artist and Independent Scholar, U.S.), “Performative Publishing and Virginia Woolf”
I-S3. Studies of To the Lighthouse
Chair: Veronika Krajíčková
Chat Moderator: Amy Smith
Eret Talviste (University of Tartu, Estonia), “To the Lighthouse and the Ethics of Wonder”
Paola Brinkley (Lamar University, U.S.), “Possession of the Angel in the House: A Dionysian Reading of To the Lighthouse”
Christine Darrohn (University of Maine at Farmington, U.S.), “Flashes of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ in To the Lighthouse: The Ethics of Intertextuality”
I-S4. Journalism, Photography, Poetic Vision: Key Ethical Issues
Chair: Marielle O’Neill
Chat Moderator: Reilly Smith
Judith Allen (Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.), “Breaking News: ‘Manufacturing Consent’ is Alive and Well”
Giulia Laddago (Università di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy), “‘Same World’, ‘Different Eyes’. Photography and Visual Narrative in Three Guineas”
12:30-1:30pm: Long break
How should one read Woolf? A workshop in translation as a mode of reading
with Maria Rita Drumond Viana (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil)
1:30-3:30pm: Roundtables
R1. Biography, Biofiction and Ethics: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group
Chairs: Todd Avery and Laura Cernat
Chat Moderator: Adam Nemmers
Moderators: Todd Avery (University of Massachusetts Lowell, US) and Laura Cernat (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
E.J. (Emma) Barnes (Novelist, UK), Lucia Boldrini (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Mark Hussey (Pace University, U.S.), Michael Lackey (University of Minnesota Morris, U.S.), Monica Latham (Université de Lorraine, France), Bethany Layne (De Montfort University, England, UK), Susan Sellers (University of St. Andrews, Scotland, UK)
The interest of Bloomsbury group members in Life-Writing experiments cannot be overstated, nor can the eccentricity of their own lives. It is no wonder, then, that the flourishing contemporary genre of biofiction, which started gaining currency in the 1930s and owes some of its insights to the momentum created by Bloomsbury experiments, celebrates the figures of the Bloomsbury group, and particularly Virginia Woolf, by reincarnating them as fictional characters. In this roundtable, we will address the ethics of writing and reading Bloomsbury-inspired biofiction as well as biography, with a focus on the questions of writerly and readerly responsibility, the extent of the freedom to alter details, the (un)importance of preserving the original personality traits of a historical figure, the uses and abuses of documentation, and the legitimacy of drawing on Woolf’s symbolic capital.
R2. The Modernist Archives Publishing Project
Chair: Alice Staveley
Chat Moderator: Casey Ford
Claire Battershill (University of Toronto, Canada), Alice Staveley (Stanford University, U.S.), Helen Southworth (University of Oregon, U.S.), Elizabeth Willson-Gordon (King’s University, Canada), Nicola Wilson (University of Reading, UK)
It has been five years since The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) launched its website at the IVWS conference in Reading, UK to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Hogarth Press. Since then, MAPP has significantly expanded its content, outputs, methodologies, and interface. This roundtable will mark the relaunch of our redesigned site—MAPP 2.0—and invite participants to explore its many new offerings. To mark the centenary of modernism’s ‘annus mirabilis’ each team member will also speak briefly about what the Hogarth Press chose to publish in 1922. What do its selections tell us about the Woolfs' artistic and entrepreneurial ventures in that pivotal year? How might renewed attention to the Hogarth Press list 'shift the accent' on debates about modernism’s origins and acmes?
R3. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene
Chair: Shilo McGiff
Chat Moderator: Valérie Favre
Peter Adkins (University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK), “Reading Woolf in the Anthropocene”
Christina Alt (St. Andrews University, Scotland, UK), “Early Twentieth-Century Anticipations of the Anthropocene”
Shinjini Chattopadhyay (Georgia Institute of Technology, U.S.), “Cosmopolitan Anthropocene: The Convergence of Climatic Consciousness and Transnationalism in The Years”
Molly Volanth Hall (Rhode Island School of Design, U.S.), “Mud and dung’: Woolf’s Environmental Mattering of War”
Derek Ryan (University of Kent, England, UK), “Virginia Woolf and Wild Reading”
Kelly Sultzbach (University of Wisconsin La Crosse, U.S.), “Staging Collective Action for an Anthropocene Audience in Between The Acts”
Rasheed Tazudeen (Yale University, U.S.), “Hearing Beyond Extinction in Between the Acts”
What does it mean to read Virginia Woolf as a writer of the Anthropocene? Woolf was all too aware that she was living through a period of unprecedented change. In her 1927 essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, she describes the present moment as defined by acceleration, ‘an age’ of being ‘not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves’. The work of the novelist, Woolf goes on to explain, is not only to find new ways of presenting modernity’s upheavals, but to do so in a way that does not fall back on tired anthropocentric narratives. This roundtable brings together scholars to reflect on Woolf’s position with the literary history of our ecological moment, exploring how Woolf’s writing registers the changing relationship between the human and nonhuman and offers new ways of thinking about planetary ethics.
3:30-4:00pm: Short break
4:00-5:30pm: Plenary III: “How the World Turns: Two Examples: Virginia Woolf and the Dreadnought Hoax; The Life of Julian Bell”
Peter Stansky (Stanford University, U.S.)