IVWS Officer Profile: Amy Smith (incoming Vice President)

Bio

Amy C. Smith is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Lamar University (Texas, USA), where she teaches courses in Ethics, Mythology, and British and World literatures, and from 2017-2020 served as Director of Faculty Development. She holds degrees in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from Binghamton University (SUNY), and has published on Woolf, Iris Murdoch, Ralph Ellison, care ethics in literature, and the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning. In 2015, she published a collection of short stories, The Good Family, by contemporary Korean author Seo Hajin, that she translated with Ally Hwang. Her first book about Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf’s Mythic Method, was published by The Ohio State University Press in 2022. In addition to working on twentieth-century engagements with myth (in Woolf, Murdoch, and Ellison), she writes about Woolf and religious experience. She has recently begun work on a project that brings together her work in ethics, comparative religious studies and Woolf studies, an examination of Woolfian virtue ethics and the role of religious experience in that ethics.

Statement of Interest

Hey y’all! (I’m a Texas transplant, blooming in the sun.) I am so excited to take up a leadership role in the IVWS, and to have the chance to express my gratitude to the Woolf community for the nurturing and inclusive space that so many have worked hard to create and maintain for many years. I have benefited from the generosity and friendship of the international Woolf community since 2010 when I co-edited a special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, “Virginia Woolf and Spirituality,” with Isabel María Andrés Cuevas. Having attended the international conference for many years, I organized the 31st annual international conference on Virginia Woolf in 2022 on the theme of “Virginia Woolf and Ethics,” and I am honored to serve on the program committee for four other conferences. Right now, I’m editing the Selected Papers from that conference, which will be published by Clemson University Press. During the summer of 2020, in the midst of the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I conspired with Ben Hagen, Shilo McGiff, and Drew Shannon to form the Woolf Salon Project, an online community of admirers and students of Woolf that has so-far hosted 25 meetings bringing together an international community of readers and thinkers. This community has been enormously generative both of my own thinking and of sustaining friendships and collaborations, and I am looking forward to the opportunity to continue contributing to its sustainability and growth.

When I’m not thinking with Woolf, I’m enjoying my six-year-old’s shenanigans, harvesting veggies from my garden, and nurturing my students.