I delivered the following essay as a paper at the 2025 Modernist Studies Association conference in Boston. (There are actually a couple more paragraphs here than in the paper as delivered, since I cut it for the sake of time.) A paragraph or so is repeated from a chapter I […]
One book can change your life. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was officially published on 14 May 1925 in Britain and the United States, making it 100 years old today, although it had a long gestation — Woolf wrote about a character named Clarissa Dalloway in her first novel, The […]
Before we are aware of it, we all of us find we are talking about Shakespeare. —Lytton Strachey, “Words and Poetry” Yet Shakespeare is a very queer case. —Virginia Woolf, “Personalities” 1. Reading Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury and Will Tosh’s Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, I […]
I continue, having really hardly stopped for decades now, to read Virginia Woolf’s two Common Reader collections. In the absence of an adequate Selected Essays (the Oxford World’s Classics one is thin and lacking even “The Death of the Moth”), the Common Readers must suffice. (For more of my thoughts […]
Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry. […]
In June 2019, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio for the International Virginia Woolf Conference, which that year had a theme of Woolf and social justice. I delivered a paper titled, “Time Passes: What Do We Do with Woolf’s Offenses?” The paper was going to appear in an academic collection, but […]
This week, I’ve been attending the annual Modern Language Association Convention, which this year is in Philadelphia. On Saturday, January 6, I was a member of a panel celebrating “100 Years of Mrs. Brown” where we looked at the implications and influence of Virginia Woolf’s essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, […]
At this year’s MLA Convention, I am honored to be on a panel devoted to “Woolf’s 21st Century Academia”, a panel sponsored by the International Virginia Woolf Society. My presentation, “Poor Queer Studies for a Society of Outsiders” positions Woolf’s Three Guineas alongside Matt Brim’s Poor Queer Studies. However, once […]