Anna Snaith

Title: “Ultrasonic Woolf”

Anna Snaith is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature at King’s College London. She has published widely on Virginia Woolf, global modernisms and literary sound studies. Her publications include Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations (Palgrave 2000), Modernist Voyages (Cambridge University Press 2014), a scholarly edition of The Years for the Cambridge University Press Edition of Virginia Woolf (2012), an edition of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Oxford World’s Classics 2015) and an edited volume on Sound and Literature (CUP 2020). Her latest Leverhulme-funded monograph is Writing Noise in Interwar Britain: Literature and the Politics of Sound (Oxford University Press, 2025). She co-organised, with Helen Tyson and Clara Jones, the 34^thAnnual International Virginia Woolf Conference at King’s and Sussex in July 2025, and is the co-director of WoolfNotes.

Elicia Clements

Title: “Affordances of Sound”

Elicia Clements is Associate Professor in the Departments of Humanities and English, York University, Canada. She has published extensively on the connections between literature and music, including the monograph Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language (U of T Press, 2019). Shorter publications comprise Woolf’s musical interchanges with Ethel Smyth and the relationship between words and music in the operas of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. She is co-editor of a collection of essays with Lesley J. Higgins titled Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts published by Palgrave Macmillan (2010). More recently, chapters on Woolf and variation form can be found in the Routledge Companion to Music and Modernism (2022), on Walter Pater’s imaginary portrait “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” in Reading Texts in Music and Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Boydel 2025), and on Ethel Smyth’s polemical writings in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion (2026). Currently, she is working on a book project titled Early Twentieth-Century Literary Musics with the aid of a SSHRC Insight Grant and co-editing, with Sarah Jensen, a collection of essays, The Politics of Intermedial Modernisms (forthcoming from Routledge, 2026).

Emma Sutton

Title: “Music of a rustic kind”

Emma Sutton is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where her research focuses on literary-musical relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work explores music’s influence on writers’ formal experiments and their politics – particularly feminism, pacifism, gender and national identity. Her publications include Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s (Oxford, 2002), Virginia Woolf and Classical Music (Edinburgh, 2013), edited collections on opera and the novel, and on Forster’s Maurice, and many essays on Woolf and music. Emma is an Associate of the UK’s Centre for Pacific Studies and has collaborated with Indigenous Pacific musicians, creative writers and scholars for nearly twenty years. In 2024, she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2025-27) for her work on music’s role in colonial Oceania.

Emma has been a board member of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, for which she is editing The Voyage Out, since its inception in 2006. She is Founding Director of the Virginia Woolf & Music project, established in 2015 with Anglo-American pianist Lana Bode and funding from the AHRC. In collaboration with composers and fellow Woolf scholars, the project has: commissioned and premiered musical compositions; championed the work of women composers associated with the Bloomsbury Group; organised concerts, exhibitions, and Woolf conference events; and worked with more than 1,600 school children on topics including music and pacifism.

Emma is fortunate to benefit from St Andrews’ rich archival holdings on Woolf and Bloomsbury, and from its co-hosting of the Cambridge edition. She has supervised more than 25 doctoral students, and spoken about her research for BBC Radio and Proms broadcasts (including with Daniel Barenboim for Wagner’s Ring cycle), ABC Radio (Australia), and Russian TV.