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Essay

Walking with Woolf: A Visual Afterlife in Albani’s Oxford Street Tide

Fatma Gökçen Sırıt

12 January 2026

Essay

The essay examines Virginia Woolf’s understanding of walking as an act that is “almost as natural and essential as thinking,” in which the rhythm of a step becomes the rhythm of consciousness, shaped by the visual field of the city. Focusing on Louisa Amelia Albani’s Virginia Woolf in the City: Oxford Street Tide pamphlet, it shows how Woolf’s image of Oxford Street as a “tide” that draws bodies into collective movement is translated into visual form, alongside moments of pause and introspection found in spaces such as the bookstore. Through these images, the essay argues that walking, whether compulsive or reflective, remains a fundamental method of perception in Woolf’s work and its artistic afterlife, where to walk is to gather impressions, to think, and to see the modern world in motion.

Essay

Tracing the Spirals: Woolf’s Archive of Being

İrem Kavallıgil

04 January, 2026

Essay

"Tracing the Spirals: Woolf’s Archive of Being" examines Virginia Woolf’s lifelong sensitivity to memory, space, and experience through the recurring metaphor of the snail and its widening spiral. Beginning with Woolf’s 1904 visit to the Brontë Parsonage, the essay argues that Woolf conceives places, objects, and houses as living archives that absorb sensations, emotions, and “moments of being.” Reading Woolf alongside Gaston Bachelard and To the Lighthouse, the text shows how material spaces preserve human presence beyond life itself. This archival rhythm—of recording, returning, and enduring—extends into contemporary artistic practices that trace Woolf’s legacy by transforming lived experience into ever-expanding creative spirals.

Symposium

The WAA Symposium

The Woolf Arts Archive

18 March, 2025

Symposium

On March 6, 2025, Woolf Arts Archive held its first major public symposium in Ankara—hosted by TED University’s English Language and Literature Department and supported by TEDU WIL—bringing together scholars, artists, and theatre practitioners to discuss Virginia Woolf’s lasting influence across art forms. The event featured talks connecting Woolf’s cultural legacy with themes relevant to International Women’s Day and culminated in the archive’s third Turkish staged reading of Freshwater: A Comedy.

Event

#Woolf142

The Woolf Arts Archive

25 January, 2024

Event

On January 25, 2024, Woolf’s 142nd birthday was marked with an online seminar led by Prof. Dr. Mine Özyurt Kılıç and Dr. Azime Pekşen Yakar, celebrating both Virginia Woolf and painter Suzanne Bellamy. Centered on Bellamy’s Woolf and the Chaucer Horse, the event explored the painting’s medieval-modernist symbolism, portraying Woolf riding Chaucer’s horse as an emblem of movement, literary authority, and women’s writing—echoing themes from A Room of One’s Own.

Event

#Woolf143

The Woolf Arts Archive

25 January, 2025

Event

The Woolf Arts Archive invites art and literature enthusiasts to a festive #Woolf143 event at Ka Atölye (Ankara): a site-specific stage reading of the new Turkish translation of Virginia Woolf’s only play, Freshwater: Bir Komedi, held alongside a photography exhibition on darkness and night workers.

Reflection

Beginning a New Year

Mine Özyurt Kılıç

01 January, 2025

Reflection

This text reflects on Virginia Woolf’s diary entry of 6 January 1925, offering an intimate portrait of her everyday life, creative process, and emotional outlook at the age of forty-four. Moving between domestic concerns, social gatherings, walks, reading, and the revision of Mrs Dalloway, the entry reveals Woolf’s method of capturing life through fragments and impressions rather than linear plot. Most notably, it emphasizes her deep appreciation for friendship and communal life, foregrounding her belief that “warm friendly feelings” are essential to both living and artistic creation, a sensibility that underpins her modernist vision of truth as a constellation of lived moments.

Essay

Snail around the Flowerbed of Literature: The Hogarth Press' Call to Slowness

Mine Özyurt Kılıç

01 November, 2024

Essay

This essay explores the symbolic significance of the snail in Virginia Woolf’s early works, particularly in “The Mark on the Wall,” and “Kew Gardens,” and the publications of the Hogarth Press. Woolf’s portrayal of the snail embodies a philosophy of slow contemplation amidst the rapid and standardizing forms of modern existence. Symbolizing a mode of deep thinking and attentive observation, the snail not only invites readers to engage in a deliberately slow approach to Woolf’s Modernist texts, but also prompts readers to attend to minutiae of everyday life and moments of being. Through literary analysis of Woolf’s artistic mission that advocates for a slower and deeper engagement with literature, and examination of the typesetting process at the Hogarth Press, this study illuminates the relevance of the snail as an emblem of slowness within both Woolf’s Modernist texts and the impetus behind the Hogarth Press.

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