Anna Snaith

Title: "Infrasonic 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

"Music of a rustic kind": Goats, Goat Music and Tragedy 

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 editing The Voyage Out for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf and is Founding Director of the Virginia Woolf & Music project (est. 2015 with Anglo-American pianist Lana Bode). 

Emma is an Associate of the UK’s Centre for Pacific Studies and has collaborated with Indigenous Pasifika 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.

Plenary Speech

"Jean Moorcroft Wilson: Music in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Life"

In this plenary lecture, Jean Moorcroft Wilson turns to the composers and performances that Leonard and Virginia listened to, exploring what music meant to them and how it wove itself into the rhythms of their shared life.