Bio
Ben Leubner studied literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz, Southern Oregon University, Montana State University, and Northeastern University, where he earned his PhD in 2009, writing his dissertation on 20th century American poetics and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. He has taught literature at Montana State University ever since, where he regularly offers courses on poetry, modernism, African American literature, and major authors, including William Shakespeare, James Joyce, August Wilson, and Virginia Woolf. His most recent publications have focused on Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill, and emergent poets such as Robert Selby and Hannah Sullivan. His writing has appeared in The Arizona Quarterly, Twentieth-Century Literature, Religion and the Arts, Bishop-Lowell Studies, The Southwest Review, The Whitefish Review, Letterature d’America, Review 31, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, the writer Katharine Smyth.
Statement of Interest
I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf for almost a quarter-century, and The Waves has been my favorite novel since I first read it in 2002. But while Woolf is indeed a writer whose work inspires me on a near-daily basis, I have never set myself the task of writing about her in a sustained and scholarly fashion. In the fall of 2022, though, I did offer a course on Woolf in which the focus was Woolf’s output from the early 1920s through the early 1930s. It was a class full of bright students, so I looked to see if there were any upcoming conferences on Woolf’s work at which some of them might present. This search ultimately brought both me and four of my students to Fort Myers this past June, where we all gave talks at the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. More importantly, we all felt tremendously at home with and welcomed by the community of Woolf scholars whom we met over the course of those four days. Upon returning home, I began thinking right away about the conference at Fresno State the following year, reaching out to other students from my Woolf class who were already envious of those who had gone to Florida. My hope is that there will once again be a strong Bobcat presence at the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.
I consider it a great honor to have been appointed President of the IVWS for the next three years. If nothing else, I want to repay to the society what I felt was gifted me in June in the form of a warm welcome, support for my students, and a genuine inquisitiveness concerning who we were as people. To that end, I hope to continue the work of Ben Hagen and other past presidents in addition to looking forward to the upcoming 100th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway and thinking of ways to commemorate this very important centennial in the world of Woolf. I hope to be a consistent presence at conferences, starting in Fresno; a responsible coordinator of events both in-person and online; and a reliable liaison for all other members of the society. I also hope to now delve into a period of research on and writing about Woolf of my own, giving my various poets a respite for the time being. And most importantly of all, especially given how important friendship was to Woolf herself, I hope to continue to build the relationships I began forming in Fort Myers, in addition to cultivating and building new ones with those of you whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting.
Woolfully yours then,
-Ben-
IVWS 