June 9-12, 2005
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR

CALL FOR PAPERS

In harmony with the annual conference’s location this year in the Pacific Northwest, coinciding with the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this year’s theme invites a wide range of papers that will emphasize the adventurousness of Woolf’s work.

Risk, daring, curiosity, experimentation, and travel (literal and metaphorical): we anticipate these motifs to echo in historical, theoretical, formalist, and political presentations on Woolf.

Topics might include, for example: Woolf and the Western World; Woolf and the New World; Exploring Pasts; Woolf and Nature/The Nature of Woolf; Indoors and Outdoors; Feminist Explorers; Lesbian Ecologies; Sexual Experiments; Center and Periphery; Woolf and Colonialism; Colonial and Postcolonial Writers and Woolf; Woolf and the Levant; Woolf and Asia; Exploring the Metropolis; Modernism’s New Territories; Archival Travels; Psychoanalysis and the Exploration of the Self; Explorations of Childhood; Tourism and Travel; The Politics of Adventure; Old and New Pastorals; Wildness; Woolf and Aboriginals; Going Native; Poetics of Space; Women and Water; the Greening of Woolf.; Pedagogy and the Art of Exploration.

            Featured Speakers: Maria DiBattista (Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fablesof Anon; Fast-Talking Dames; First Love: The Affections of Modern Fiction); Jed Esty (A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England); Diane Gillespie (The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell); Douglas Mao (Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production); Yopie Prins (Victorian Sappho)

Proposals for individual papers, three-person panels, workshops, round tables, and conversations are welcomed.  We also encourage alternative presentations, such as performances, readings, and multi-media events.  Independent scholars, high school teachers, and “common readers” are encouraged to submit proposals.

Proposals will be considered anonymously.  Proposals should be submitted electronically as an attachment and must include: one cover page, with name(s) and address(es); institutional affiliations (where applicable); phone numbers; title of individual paper(s), or panel, and format; and a 250-word abstract for an individual paper or for EACH presentation in a panel.  Include title of paper(s) or panel on the abstract, but NOT names.  Conference sessions are 90 minutes.

Conference website

Deadline: January 15, 2005 postmark.

Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2005

Send proposals to: vwoolf05@lclark.edu

Questions?  Contact Rishona Zimring at the following email address: vwoolf05@lclark.edu or call the English Department, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR 503-768-7405.  Selected conference papers will be published.