Virginia Woolf & Ecologies II
Fall Symposium on Virginia Woolf
October 20th – 22nd, 2023
On Zoom
https://v-woolf-society.com/virginia-woolf-ecologies-ii-cfp/

Ecology (noun): ecol·​o·​gy |  \ i-ˈkä-lə-jēn. 

plural ecologies

1a: The branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment. Also: the relationships themselves, esp. those of a specified organism.

1c: In extended use: the interrelationship between any system and its environment; the product of this.

– Oxford English Dictionary, “ecology n.”

The organizers of the International Virginia Woolf Society’s Fall Symposium invite paper and panel proposals that engage with our 2023 theme, “Virginia Woolf and Ecologies.” We seek to foster conversations about a wide range of ecologically relevant topics. Proposals may address ecological concerns in or illuminated by Woolf’s work, but they might alternately explore artistic, social, political, economic, racial, decolonial, anti-ableist, and/or queer ecologies, among others, in or alongside Woolf’s novels, essays, letters, or diaries.

THE IVWS Fall Symposium will be fully online. 

How might Woolf’s writing invite us to think ecologically? How might her political, ethical, and aesthetic engagements open ways of perceiving, imagining, creating, and acting that radically revise the assumptions of anthropocentrism—among them, the separate, superior, and intrinsic value of the human? What implications might ecological thinking have for archival, decolonial, queer, and crip projects or inquiries shaped by postcolonial studies, digital humanities, or medical humanities? What are Woolfian ecologies? How might Woolfian ecologies help us map, explore, define, or disrupt concepts of time, place, and scale?  How does “ecology” help us think through circuits of exchange, consumption, and capital in Woolf’s writings?  Where might we position Woolf or her writings within larger constellations of literary and/or modernist studies? How might a consideration of Woolf and Ecologies together encourage us, as Woolf writes in The Years, “to live differently—differently”?

Proposals might address the following topics:

• the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism, climate change and the environment, biodiversity and sustainability

• writing and writing cultures, literary history and allusion, genre and form, intertextuality

• philosophical or theoretical resonance(s), including non-human, animal and food studies, environmental and energy humanities, and others

• cosmopolitan and transnational literary networks

• economic and political structures

• embodiment, mutation, formation and transformation

• autopoiesis or symbiopoiesis 

• embeddedness, community, relation and interrelation

• temporality, extinction, scarcity 

• technologies, landscapes, soundscapes, inscapes

• affect and sensation, perception, psychogeography

• naturecultures and culturenatures

• ecofeminism, war and peace, institutions, and more.    

Papers on members of the Bloomsbury Group and other associates of Virginia Woolf in relation to the conference theme are also encouraged. We welcome proposals from scholars, students, artists, and common readers of all backgrounds and disciplines. 

Abstracts of 250 words maximum (500 words for panels) are due on July 31st, 2023. 

If you have a Google account, follow this link to the Symposium Submission Form to submit a proposal and cover page: https://forms.gle/MEXcimm8r9r9mnpW8. If you do not have a Google account, send your abstract as an attachment to woolfecologies@gmail.com. Do not include your name or any other identifying information in your abstract. Please also attach a cover sheet that includes your name, preferred pronouns, presentation title, five keywords, time zone from which you would be presenting, and institutional affiliation.

As in previous years, presenters will have the opportunity to submit their work for publication in the selected papers series. Send queries to Shilo McGiff and Laci Mattison at  woolfecologies@gmail.com.