Department of English
33rd Annual International Conference On Virginia Woolf
Woolf, Modernity, Technology
June 6-9, 2024
California State University, Fresno
Pre- and post-conference activities: June 5 to Yosemite National Park, and June 9
to Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks
Conference organizer: Dr. J. Ashley Foster
Contact: woolf2024@mail.fresnostate.edu
Call for Papers
Submission Deadline: Extended to January 31, 2024
Read more about the CFP from Blogging Woolf
“On or about December 1910 human character changed.”
— Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.
--- Redux: ---
“On or about December 2022 human character was called into question.”
— Informed by the emergence of ChaptGPT and evolving AI
The organizers of the 33rd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf invite paper, panel, workshop, and exhibition proposals that engage with our 2024 theme, “Woolf, Modernity, Technology.” Technological innovation regularly inspires a social, cultural, artistic, and political revolution. Though evolving artificial intelligence programs are the most recent iteration of this, epistemological and ontological crises underwritten by technics reverberate through modernity. This conference embraces the expansive, cosmopolitan, and transnational turn in modernist studies to trace the interaction of networks with the aesthetics, techniques, and vocabulary of modernisms and the way in which these modernisms are indebted to modernity’s technological ruptures and innovations.
Accelerating technological climates force us to ask, what does it mean to be human? If a machine can make and replicate art and literature, and possibly even innovate in the arts, where does that leave space for us as creators and contributors? Do human-agent interactions redefine relations again, redoubling what Woolf said in 1924, that “All human relations have shifted,” which leads to “a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature”? Where do we locate the nexus of the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” that Woolf wrote about in To The Lighthouse? Is it (can it be?) contained in the output of an algorithm?
“Woolf, Modernity, Technology” brings into relief relations and tensions between literature, art, technology, modernity, and humanity that modernism broadly, and Woolf specifically, has long negotiated. Here, we define both modernity and technology in their most expansive and loosest expressions: modernity invites historical, political, economic, cultural, and theoretical approaches – among many others – and technology invites thinking on techné and technics, technology, technicity, technique, tool, on art, writing, and praxis as technologies.
Possible topics might include:
- gender, race, sexualities, and relationships in the rise of modernity and an age of innovation
- modernity and/or technology and ontology, metaphysics, ethics, epistemology
- techne, tech, technics
- technology’s and modernity’s relation to nature or the natural
- digital humanities, critical digital pedagogy, or pedagogical experiments with technology
- writing, communication, or travel technologies
- extended, augmented, and virtual realities
- aesthetic innovation, poiesis, art and artistic production, art and AI
- technologies of peace
- technologies of war, imperialist expansion, or capitalism
- explorations of what it means to be human, animal, or machine
- medical humanities and scientific approaches
- technologies of printing and publishing
- neural networks, network theory, collaboration, loops, and circuits
- human-agent interaction
- technology, modernity, temporality
While this list offers suggestions or possible entrances into a conversation, we welcome all ideas and approaches and seek to traverse disciplines and time periods. Anyone interested in presenting is invited to submit a proposal for a paper, panel, roundtable, workshop, or exhibition on Woolfian or Bloomsbury topics. Exhibitions could be digital (as in digital humanities projects) or could include exhibits of crafts or material objects related to the conference theme. Interactive workshops of 90 minutes will also be offered throughout the conference and we welcome submissions for non-traditional formats. Please specify in your proposal if you are submitting:
- An interactive workshop (Abstract of 500 words)
- Panel or Roundtable (abstract of 500 words for the entire panel or roundtable)
- A paper (abstract of 250 words)
- A digital/material object exhibition (abstract of 250 words)
- A non-traditional form of presenting (abstract of 250-500 words)
Questions should be sent to woolf2024@mail.fresnostate.edu. Please register proposals through the above and below submission buttons by January 31, 2024.