Call for Papers [link to conference website]
34th Annual International Virginia Woolf Conference 2025: ‘Woolf and Dissidence’
King’s College London: July 4, 2025, and the University of Sussex: July 5-8, 2025. Co-organisers: Helen Tyson (Sussex), Clara Jones (King’s) and Anna Snaith (King’s).
Virginia Woolf practised a politics of dissent. From her pacifism, deeply held through two World Wars, to her feminism, Woolf continually wrote back to power. She urged transgression and trespass and ‘thinking against the current’ (‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’). Dissent takes many forms in her oeuvre from the overt politics of her major essays to her novelistic defamiliarizing of patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist society. Narratologically, too, her writing swerves and undercuts: its experimentation a form of dissident aesthetics.
The organisers of the 34th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference invite paper, panel, workshop and exhibitions proposals that engage with the theme of ‘Woolf and Dissidence’. We seek to foster conversations about the nature and contexts of Woolf’s dissidence or that of her predecessors, contemporaries and inheritors. What are the limitations of her politics? In what ways did she conform?
In the centenary year of the publication of Mrs Dalloway it is fitting that the 34th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference returns to the UK and to two locations with strong Woolfian connections: King’s College London where Woolf studied as a teenager and to Sussex, home to Monk’s House and Charleston. Our theme also honours the history of the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, founded by Alan Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore, at the University of Sussex. The Centre’s pioneering work in sexuality and queer studies provides a fitting context for the Woolf conference.
Possible topics could include exploration of Woolf, her contemporaries and the following:
-political, sexual, gender dissidence: then and now
-outsiderness and exile
-the politics of refusal
-pacifism
-dissident ecologies and the more-than-human world
-the rhetoric of dissent
-organisational, institutional or networks of dissent
-aesthetic or artistic dissent
-religious dissent
-radical, activist or mainstream publishing
-revolution and activism (in relation to race, gender, sexuality, ecology)
-convention, orthodoxy or conformity (political, social, literary, aesthetic)
-dissident readings of Woolf
This list is only a starting point, and we encourage all ideas and approaches including transdisciplinary, transhistorical and collaborative work. We welcome submissions from academics, readers, students of Woolf and for:
-individual papers (1500-characters abstract)
-panels or roundtables (3000-characters abstract)
– interactive workshops (3000-characters abstract)
-exhibits or posters (including digital and material) (3000-characters abstract)
-a non-traditional (dissident?) form of presentation (3000-characters abstract)
Please apply via our submission form. Deadline: 13 December 2024.
IVWS 