Friday 4 July
King’s College London Archive Visit
Location: Archives Reading Room, S3.02 Strand Building.
Available times: 10-11am, 11:30-12:30pm, 1:30-2:30pm
Virginia Woolf studied History, Greek, Latin and German at King’s College London’s Ladies Department between 1897 and 1902. This event will take place in the King’s Archives and participants will be able to view materials relating to Woolf’s studies such as registration books, syllabi and ephemera relating to the College. The event will include a brief introduction from the archive team and Professor Anna Snaith will talk about the discovery of the materials in 2009 and its impact on Woolf studies.
‘Virginia Woolf: Creative Engagements’
Location: Safra Lecture Theatre, Strand Campus, King’s College London
Time: 4-6pm.
‘Virginia Woolf: Creative Engagements’ brings together a roundtable of artists, creative writers and practitioners to reflect on the role Woolf’s life and writing plays in their work. Director and dramaturg Uzma Hameed, novelists Jo Hamya and Olivia Laing, theatre and opera director Katie Mitchell, and multi-media artist A T Kabe Wilson, will be in dialogue with KCL academic and writer Jon Day about what it means to engage with Woolf’s literary and artistic legacies in our own contemporary moment, considering the aspects of her work that they champion and those they critique.
Uzma Hameed is a British writer, director and dramaturg. A regular collaborator of choreographer Wayne McGregor, she was Dramaturg on Woolf Works (Olivier Award), The Dante Project (South Bank Sky Arts Award), Obsidian Tear, and Multiverse for the Royal Ballet; MADDADDAM for the National Ballet of Canada and the Royal Ballet; Autobiography, Universe: A Dark Crystal Odyssey and Deepstaria for Company Wayne McGregor; AfteRite-LORE for La Scala (Danza&Danza Award). Other dramaturgy credits include Northern Ballet’s Victoria (South Bank Sky Arts Award) and The Seven Deadly Sins/Mahagonny Songspiel for the Royal Opera. UNDYING, a novel co-authored with her sister Ambreen Hameed, was published in 2021 (Bath Novel Award longlist).
Jo Hamya is the author of the novels Three Rooms (2021) and The Hypocrite (2024). Her literary criticism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Independent, and the Financial Times among others. She is currently pursuing a doctorate on literary value and social media at King’s College London.
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of eight books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time. Laing’s first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Their books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Laing’s new novel, The Silver Book, will be published in November.
Katie Mitchell is a theatre and opera director. She has directed over 100 productions in a thirty year career, including a multi-media adaptation, Waves, of Woolf’s The Waves (National Theatre 2006) and of Orlando (Schaubühne, Berlin). She has worked extensively at theatres and opera houses in the UK, Germany, Holland, France and Denmark. In 2009 she was awarded an OBE for services to drama and she is currently Professor of Theatre Directing at Royal Holloway, University of London
A T Kabe Wilson is a UK multimedia artist with a particular focus on adaptation across different forms. As part of an ongoing creative engagement with British modernism, especially the work of Virginia Woolf, he has produced The Dreadlock Hoax, a performance piece that adapted and inverted the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, Olivia N’Gowfri – Of One Woman or So, an extended experiment in literary recycling, ‘On Being Still’ (The Modernist Review #25), a series of paintings and writings that scrutinises his own engagement with the Bloomsbury Group, and Looking for Virginia: An Artist’s Journey through 100 Archives, a multimedia archival project developed for his 2023 residency at the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex.
The plenary event will be followed by a drinks reception (6-7pm in the Great Hall) with background music by the Woolf Quartet featuring:
- Zosia Herlihy-O’Brien (violin)
- Emily Harrison (violin)
- Beatrice Slocumbe (viola)
- Emma Osterrieder (cello) – deputy for Hoda Jahanpour
Founded at the Royal Academy of Music, the Woolf Quartet comprises four versatile creatives dedicated to the coming together of new and old. The quartet (Zosia Herlihy-O’Brien and Emily Harrison violins, Beatrice Slocumbe viola, Hoda Jahanpour cello) enjoy performing well-known repertoire side by side with unexplored and contemporary music. They have a strong desire to mirror the eclecticism of their musical identities in their programming and sharing what they love. Named after famed author Virginia Woolf, the quartet are frequently based in Bloomsbury and rehearse on the site where Woolf once lived. Most recently the quartet were described in a review of their concert at Chamber Music Weymouth – including a programme of Debussy, Caroline Shaw and a work by their own cellist, Hoda Jahanpour – as ‘young artists who bring fresh ideas’. They are looking forward to upcoming engagements in Berlin where they will collaborate with audio producer and sound artist Caroline Siegers, Bradfield Festival of Music, the London Charterhouse, and Wigmore Hall where they will be the Learning Ensemble Fellows for 2025-26.
Saturday 5 July
Between the Acts, Adapted by Eleanor Lybeck. Directed by Jen Heyes
Sponsored by Refugee Tales.
Location: ACCA (Attenborough Centre for Creative Arts), University of Sussex Falmer campus
Bar opens 6.30, performance starts 7.30pm
Conference delegates will be offered an opportunity to reserve a ticket after registering for the conference. Further tickets may be available for purchase subject to availability.
It’s 2039. The Oliver family, along with thousands of other refugees, have been displaced by a major climate emergency from their homes on the coast of northwest England. The only place where they can find shelter is the local immigration removal centre, Pointz Hall. There, they live alongside people who, like them, have been forced to leave their homes and face the reality of life in detention. But when government-contracted theatremaker Paula La Trobe brings the community together in her radical pageant of English history, the audience gets more than they bargained for.
Lybeck’s adaptation, directed by Heyes (Adelaide Fringe Festival Award Winner 2024), has been described as ‘arresting, hilarious, and edgy’ in its portrait of contemporary Britain. Across Spring 2024, Lybeck and Heyes worked with physical performer Seamus Lavan (Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq, 2023), musician Tom McConnell (Novelty Island) and members of the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detainees to bring this script authentically to life. This special performance will be the first time the work is shared in full with an audience, and the company are delighted to be joined by members of AVID and representatives of the event’s sponsors, Refugee Tales, for a post-show Q&A.
Eleanor Lybeck is a senior lecturer in literature at the University of Liverpool and co-director of the company Sidelong Glance, which she founded in 2008 to produce research-led theatre and film. Eleanor was named an AHRC/BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker in 2017 and has been a judge for the John McGahern Prize in Debut Irish Fiction since 2021.
Jen Heyes is an award-winning director based on the Wirral. She is currently the Director in Residence at the prestigious University of Liverpool where she is developing several new works with Dr Eleanor Lybeck including Virginia Woolf’s Between The Acts for 2025/26. As Associate Director for London Artists Projects, her credits include Truth To Power Café – winner Adelaide Fringe Festival 2024, UK/International touring and digital adaptation: a finalist of the Oncomm, off West End, award for innovation, and the Singaporean world premiere edition of This Is Who I Am. As founder and director of her company CutToTheChase Productions www.cuttothechaseproductions.uk, Jen has produced and directed an impressive body of acclaimed work including EPSTEIN, The Man Who Made The Beatles (London, West End) and the international touring, Oncomm nominated HEDDA (after Ibsen) starring the iconic avant gardist David Hoyle. Jen is currently creating the centenary, cinematic theatre, adaptation of Mrs Dalloway (after Woolf), embodied by the illustrious trans artist Kit Green to premiere in 2026 at Storyhouse, Chester.
Sunday 6 July
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
Location: Jubilee Lecture Theatre
Time: 4.00-5.30pm.
‘Mrs. Dalloway at 100’ reflects on the legacy of Woolf’s most influential novel a century after its publication. In a roundtable conversation with Mark Hussey, author of the forthcoming Mrs. Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (May 2025), participants will consider the novel’s afterlives in terms of popular culture, music, global reception, bibliomemoir, and more. This roundtable, chaired by Amy Smith, features Rachel Bowlby, Laura Cernat, Jeanne Dubino, Monica Latham, Brenda Silver, Katharine Smyth, Alice Staveley, and Emma Sutton.
Tuesday 8 July
A Sketch of the Past: Urmila Seshagiri and Derek Ryan in Conversation
Location: Jubilee Lecture Theatre
Time: 1.00-2.00pm.
Professor Urmila Seshagiri (University of Tennessee) is producing the first standalone scholarly edition of Woolf’s unfinished autobiography, A Sketch of the Past. She will speak with Dr Derek Ryan (University of Kent) about a transcription of Sketch that reveals the memoir’s long-obscured radical artistry.
Urmila Seshagiri is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell) and the editor of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (Oxford) and The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories by Virginia Woolf (Princeton). Her work has appeared in PMLA, Woolf Studies Annual, Modernism/ modernity, and Modern Fiction Studies., and she serves as Out of the Archives Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies. Professor Seshagiri’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University of Kent. His most recent monograph is Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernist Literature (Cambridge UP, 2022) and his latest edited volume is A History of the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge UP, 2025), which includes research supported by a Sassoon Visiting Fellowship at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Edition of Flush: A Biography and Series Editor of Edinburgh UP’s Virginia Woolf – Variations.
Tuesday 8 July
Exhibiting Modernism Today
Location: Jubilee Lecture Theatre
Time: 4.00-5.30pm.
This panel discussion will focus on exhibiting modernism today. In a discussion chaired by Sophie Oliver, Darren Clarke, Charlie Porter and Hope Wolf will reflect on their own experiences as curators and explore different approaches to exhibiting modernism in the present day.
Dr Darren Clarke is the Head of Collections and Research for The Charleston Trust. He has curated several exhibitions including Vanessa Bell: A world of form and colour (2025), Collecting Modernism: Pablo Picasso to Winifred Nicholson (2024), Very Private? (2022), Duncan Grant: 1920 (2021), Post-Impressionist Living: The Omega Workshops (2019) and Orlando at the present time (2018). Among his published works he has contributed to Queer Bloomsbury (EUP, 2016) as well as numerous catalogue essays. He is editor of the Charleston Press.
Sophie Oliver is Senior Lecturer in Modernism at the University of Liverpool. She curated the exhibition ‘Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea and the Making of an Author’ at the British Library in 2016; a show about poetry and fashion for the National Poetry Library in 2023; and is now working on an exhibition of Gertrude Stein’s personal objects, opening at the Harry Ramson Center in August 2026. Her first book, Undone: A Women’s History of Modernism Told Through Clothes, will be out around the same time, from Manchester University Press.
Charlie Porter is a writer and curator whose most recent book is the novel Nova Scotia House. In 2023, he curated the exhibition Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and Fashion at Charleston in Lewes, accompanied by the book Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion. His first book was the 2021 title What Artists Wear.
Dr Hope Wolf is a writer, curator, and Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex, where she also co-Directs the Centre for Modernist Studies. She curated the current Sussex Modernism exhibition at Towner Eastbourne, which is based on her book of the same title that was published by Yale University Press in April 2025. The exhibition and book expanded a show she developed with Two Temple Place, London, in 2017. Other exhibitions she has curated include ‘A Tale of Mother’s Bones: Grace Pailthorpe, Reuben Mednikoff and the Birth of Psychorealism’, that toured between the De La Warr Pavilion, Camden Arts Centre, and Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange.
Woolf 2025 