International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Charleston, Credit: Stuart Robinson
Between the Acts, adapted from Virginia Woolf's novel by Eleanor Lybeck and directed by Jen Heyes, Credit: Chen Cannell
Drinks in the garden at Charleston, Credit: Stuart Robinson
Madelyn Detloff delivers her keynote lecture, ‘Throwing a Brick Like a Grrrrl: When to Build, When to Break in Perilous Political Times', Credit: Stuart Robinson
This summer, the University of Sussex and King’s College London hosted the 34th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf on the theme of ‘Woolf and Dissidence’. With over 350 scholars, writers, readers and artists from around the globe, this was the largest Woolf conference to date. It was the first time that the conference has come to Sussex—a place with strong Woolfian connections, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s home Monk’s House, and a unique archive of Woolf’s writings held in the University of Sussex Special Collections at the Keep.
Beginning with pre-conference events at King’s College London, participants took part in archive visits and a roundtable discussion on ‘Virginia Woolf: Creative Engagements’, featuring writers Jo Hamya and Olivia Laing, artist A T Kabe Wilson, and dramaturg Uzma Hameed, reflecting on their own diverse engagements with Woolf’s life and writing.
The conference proper took place at the University of Sussex. It featured two keynote lectures by Anne Fernald and Madelyn Detloff; a performance at the ACCA of Between the Acts relocated to an immigration detention centre in 2039 and followed by a post-performance Q&A with writer Eleanor Lybeck, director Jen Heyes, Refugee Tales and the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees (AVID); a roundtable to mark the centenary of Mrs Dalloway and the publication of Mark Hussey’s biography of that novel; interactive workshops, including a printing workshop, a bookbinding workshop, and a visit to the Monk’s House Papers; a plenary discussion on Exhibiting Modernism Today; and visits to Charleston, Monk’s House and the Sussex Modernism exhibition at the Towner Eastbourne.
Conference participants were also invited to visit Pressing Matters: Printing with Virginia Woolf, an exhibition that brings together contemporary art that engages with the work of Virginia Woolf as both a modernist writer and publisher, curated by the Centre for Modernist Studies and on display at the University of Sussex Library Exchange until 29 September.
Taking up creative, critical, even dissident approaches to Woolf’s work, conference participants explored Woolf’s role as a dissident writer and thinker in her own time, while also exploring both the possibilities and challenges of engaging with her work today. Over the course of the conference, Woolf emerged as a writer whose reckoning with the historical crises of her own era speaks powerfully, even urgently, to our own global crises today.
The conference was co-organised by Helen Tyson, Katherine Blackadder, and Michelle Gibson in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, and Clara Jones and Anna Snaith at King’s College London.