International Virginia Woolf Conference

Nicola Wilson writes:

Last month I was fortunate to go to Vancouver for the 23rd annual International Virginia Woolf Conference, this year on ‘Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader’. It was a wonderful few days! I was part of a roundtable presentation with two colleagues from the States and two from Canada in which we were outlining our plans for ‘The Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP)’. We have all worked previously on the Hogarth Press business archive, based here in Reading, and plan to produce a digital guide to the Press, indicating the key people involved with it (authors, editors, designers etc) which will also include searchable material on the texts the Woolfs’ produced. The site will feature selected Hogarth Press material from Special Collections in Reading, the University of Toronto’s Pratt Library, the University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Library, and Washington State Pullman University (which houses the Virginia and Leonard Woolf library).

Virginia Woolf

I had met three of project team in person before, during their visits to Reading, and we have been using project management software to communicate a lot, but it was the first time we had all been together in person so was very productive in terms of planning and also a lot of fun. Wonderfully, we also found out while we were over there that we have been granted two-year funding from the Canadian SSHRC to get the project off the ground. We now have some funds for tech consultancy (we are using Drupal) and a postdoc and hope to get teams of student-volunteers involved in the project – writing ‘people’ profiles etc, as in Yale’s successful collaboratively-authored ‘Modernism Lab’ http://modernism.research.yale.edu/ – from the autumn term.

About Cindy

Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
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