Bio
Shilo McGiff is a founder and Co-Conspirator at the Woolf Salon Project. Along with Valérie Favre, she is Guest Editor of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany Issue #99: “Portmanteau Woolf.” Her writing can be found in Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (June, 2024), Virginia Woolf – Objects, Things, Matter (forthcoming, 2025), Virginia Woolf and Ethics: Selected Papers and the Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theater and Dramatic Criticism (2023). She is currently co-editing the Routledge Companion to Virginia Woolf along with Benjamin Hagen and Laci Mattison. She has a PhD in English Language and Literature from Cornell University and over a decade of college teaching experience. She began working on Woolf while writing (what was supposed to be) a single dissertation chapter on Woolf and pastoral and never quite stopped. She currently serves as a board member of Feminist Modernist Studies. She lives in Ithaca, NY.
Statement of Interest
Many of you know me as one of the Co-Conspirators (along with Ben Hagen, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon) at The Woolf Salon Project. Some of you may know me from my programming work on the last three Annual Conferences on Virginia Woolf (Profession and Performance, 2021; Virginia Woolf & Ethics, 2022; Virginia Woolf & Ecologies, 2023). What you might not know is that my service to the IVWS and the various communities of Woolf studies spanned a turbulent transition in which I made the very difficult decision to leave my full time teaching position at a struggling small liberal arts college and step into a no less certain role as an Independent Scholar.
My own educational history is broken and beautifully itinerant. The “beauty,” however, often comes in hindsight…maybe as the sister of wisdom, maybe as the continually rendered shadow self we again and again reclaim. In the moment, however, it often just feels excruciating: never on time, never according to plan, never quite legible. This itinerancy has taken me from an experimental college in New England as teenager to community college and a tiny liberal arts women’s college in Upstate New York as a young single mom and finally on to Cornell University. In the process, I studied theatre, performance art, anthropology, poetry, and pedagogy. I taught children’s theatre and worked as an actor and director. I bartended, waitressed, cleaned apartments, tutored, worked in a small independent bookstore as a bookseller and community events organizer. I taught 8 courses a year as an adjunct instructor. I loved and wrangled my children—sometimes with help and often alone.
When I filed my dissertation in 2018 and began my first full time faculty position as a VAP, it had taken me 24 years to complete this institutional journey, and I had raised two young men in the process. Perhaps this is why I was and am still drawn so powerfully to pastoral and to Woolf—to the aesthetic promise and necessity of green time and to the vision of the poor college she describes in Three Guineas. Perhaps this is also why I am drawn to the community, companionship, and collaborative scholarship that can emerge from a society like the IVWS.
I consider myself a community builder. I like drawing people together and drawing out ideas in conversation or in meaningful collaborations. I see my work as an editor, thesis supervisor, salon host, or event programmer as extensions of my classroom ethos which are extensions of my theatre training which extends from and hones habits of attention, curiosity, and play. I see my role at the IVWS in much the same way—an invitation to the work at hand.
IVWS 