Archive, Edition, Life: A Plenary Roundtable

Mark Hussey is Distinguished Professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, General Editor of the Harcourt Annotated Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (for which he edited To the Lighthouse), on the editorial board of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf (for which he edited Between the Acts), and is a co-editor of Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Modernism’s Print Cultures, co-written with Faye Hammill, came out in 2016 as part of Bloomsbury Academic’s New Modernisms series. Hussey founded the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf in 1991 and has just completed a new biography of Clive Bell.

Urmila Seshagiri is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as well as affiliate faculty in Global Studies and Cinema Studies. Her areas of expertise include modernism, contemporary fiction, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. The author of Race and the Modernist Imagination (Cornell, 2010), Seshagiri is now writing a book about the complex legacy of modernist aesthetics titled Still Shocking: Modernism and Fiction in the 21st Century. She is also preparing the first scholarly edition of Virginia Woolf’s memoir Sketch of the Past, a project for which she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and Smith College. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Woolf Studies Annual, and The Journal of Asian American Studies. She is the Out of the Archives Editor for Feminist Modernist Studies, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.

Drew Shannon is an associate professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at Mount St. Joseph University, where he teaches primarily British literature from Shakespeare to the present. A native of Atlanta, Shannon grew up in Austin, TX, but has lived in Cincinnati since the mid-1980s. He is currently working on his manuscript, The Deep Old Desk: A Biography of the Diary of Virginia Woolf. He has published critical articles and essays in several books and academic journals as well as a monograph for Cecil Woolf Publishers’s Bloomsbury Heritage Series entitled How Should One Read a Marriage?: Private Writings, Public Readings, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. He was the Historian/Bibliographer of the International Virginia Woolf Society (2015–2020) and serves the editorial board of Woolf Studies Annual. His research interests, apart from Virginia Woolf, include the lives and writings of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, D. H. Lawrence, and Christopher Isherwood. At Mount St. Joseph, Shannon has also produced, acted in, and/or directed such shows as Doubt: A Parable, God of Carnage, Crossing Delancey, And Then There Were None, California Suite, and Six Degrees of Separation.

Dr. Jean Moorcroft Wilson has taught for many years at the University of London. She has also been a guest lecturer for the last 12 years at the University of Cape Town. She has lectured frequently in America and, most recently, at the University of Artois, Arras, and the University of Victoria, Vancouver Island. She is a regular contributor to The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement. Wilson is the author of acclaimed biographies of the British war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Robert Graves – the first of his life; the second half is in active production. She has also edited the poems of Isaac Rosenberg and the poems and letters of Sorley. Her single-volume life of Sassoon, containing new material, was published in 2013. She was married to Cecil Woolf, the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, on whom she has written a biography of place. Between them, she and Cecil started the Bloomsbury Heritage series, of which she is the General Editor. She is also General Editor of their War Poets series.