Plenary Speakers
Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Honors College, and the Office of Scholarly Innovation and Student Research
Ecological Difference, Sexual Difference and the Oceanic
Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at Penn State University. She has written books and articles on contemporary European philosophy, literary history, gender studies, queer theory, visual culture and feminist philosophy. Her most recent book is What Would You Do and Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (2022).
"For there She Was": Writing about now and then with "Mrs. Dalloway" and Virginia Woolf
Asali Solomon’s latest novel, The Days of Afrekete has been called “a feat of engineering” by the New York Times. She is also the author of Disgruntled and Get Down: stories. Her previous novel, Disgruntled, was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and The Denver Post. She is the recipient of a Pew Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Vibe, Essence, The Paris Review Daily, McSweeney’s, on NPR, and in several anthologies including The Best Short Stories of 2021: The O. Henry Prize Collection. Solomon is the Bertrand K. Wilbur Chair in the Humanities at Haverford, where she is a Professor of English and director of Creative Writing.
Virginia Woolf's Food Ecologies: A Dialogue with Jessica Martell & Vicki Tromanhauser
Jessica Martell is assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Appalachian State University in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She is the author of Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire (2020), which features her research on Virginia Woolf. She also co-edited Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Avant-Garde (2019). Her essays on modernism, food, film, and ecocriticism have appeared in Modernist Cultures, Journal of Modern Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Gastronomica, and six scholarly collections. Martell is a local leader in non-profit work supporting alternative food systems and served for six years on the Board of Directors of Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture, a feminist agricultural nonprofit serving rural Appalachia.
Vicki Tromanhauser is Associate Professor and Chair of English at SUNY, New Paltz, where her research
focuses on animal studies, disability, and food in twentieth-century British literature.
Her articles have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, Woolf Studies Annual, and Virginia Woolf Miscellany, as well as in various essay collections. She is currently working on a book titled Modernist Meat, which explores changing configurations of flesh in early twentieth-century British
women’s writing. She received the Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism for
2012, and she serves on the editorial board of Twentieth-Century Literature and the PMLA Advisory Committee.
Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, through Family Eyes
Jean Moorcroft Wilson has been described as the 'doyenne of war poet biographers'. Her publications include biographies of Isaac Rosenberg (on whom she lectures worldwide), Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas and Virginia Woolf.
Events
Printed Works: Adaptations of Viginia Woolf
Ane Thon Knutsen is a Norwegian artist and designer specialized in letterpress. Knutsen works at the multidisciplinary intersection between graphic design, art, research and dissemination. Knutsen exhibits internationally, and her works take form as installations and artist books. Knutsen is associate professor in graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts, where she also defended her practice-based PhD on Virginia Woolf's work as a typesetter and self-publisher. Knutsen has won several awards for this work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo. Find her work at cargocollective.com/anethonknutsen.
Printed Works: Adaptations of Viginia Woolf currently on exhitbit in FGCU’s University Archives & Special Collections.
Poetry Reading
Erik Fuhrer is the author of six poetry collections, including VOS (Yavanika Press, 2019), a full-length erasure of Virginia Woolf’s A Voyage Out. Their recent work is inspired by the work of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Their poetry collection, Gellar Studies, is forthcoming in 2023, and their memoir, My Buffed Up Life, which features Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fictional interlocutor, is forthcoming in 2024, both with Spuyten Duyvil Press. In January 2023, their first play was released with Free Lines Press. Find them at www.erik-fuhrer.com.
No Single Body for Me to Follow
A founding member of Ghostbird Theatre Company, James Brock has had produced six full-length plays, and for his plays he has won three individual
artist grants from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. His play, Because Beauty Must Be Broken Daily, a play where Virginia Woolf makes several cameo appearances, was named best new play
of 2013–14 by the Naples Daily News. He is also a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, and he has had four
books of poetry published. He teaches creative writing and contemporary literature
at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. Find his work at www.BrockPlays.com.
