The 34th International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Woolf and Dissidence

King’s College London: July 4, 2025, and the University of Sussex: July 5-8, 2025.

Handwritten scroll against parchment reads 'though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes'

Artwork by A. T. Kabe Wilson

We are delighted to bring the Annual Virginia Woolf Conference back to the UK and to two sites – King’s College London and the University of Sussex – with such strong Woolfian connections.

This year’s conference explores the theme of ‘Virginia Woolf and Dissidence’. Virginia Woolf practised a politics of dissent. From her pacifism, deeply held through two World Wars, to her feminism, Woolf continually wrote back to power. She urged transgression and trespass and ‘thinking against the current’ (‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’). Dissent takes many forms in her oeuvre from the overt politics of her major essays to her novelistic defamiliarizing of patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist society. Narratologically, too, her writing swerves and undercuts: its experimentation a form of dissident aesthetics.

The organisers of the 34^th Annual Virginia Woolf Conference invite paper, panel, workshop and exhibitions proposals that engage with the theme of ‘Woolf and Dissidence’. We seek to foster conversations about the nature and contexts of Woolf’s dissidence or that of her predecessors, contemporaries and inheritors. What are the limitations of her politics? In what ways did she conform?

The pre-conference events will be held at King’s College London on Friday July 4^th: a visit to the King’s Archives and a panel discussion on ‘Virginia Woolf: Creative Engagements’ with contemporary writers and artists speaking about their multi-media engagements with Woolf’s writing. On Saturday July 5^th the conference proper will open for registration at the University of Sussex.

Please see our Woolf 2025 website for more details about keynote speakers, performances, workshops and other featured events, including our conference dinner and house tour at Charleston.

Helen Tyson (University of Sussex), Clara Jones (King’s College London) and Anna Snaith (King’s College London).