Following Marion L. Brittain Fellow Dr. Amanda Golden’s English 1102 “Digital Woolf” course in Fall 2013 at Georgia Tech, Kaul submitted a proposal on his own for the conference, and it was accepted.

Dr. Golden’s “Digital Woolf” course—a version of English 1102 offered in the Writing and Communication Program—addressed Virginia Woolf’s fiction, essays, and excerpts from her journals alongside the literature and art of the Bloomsbury Group. The students completed a series of multimodal projects that included creating annotated maps of Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room (1922) and designing Woolf Apps (applications) to enable readers to better understand Woolf’s difficult and opaque writing. 

During English 1102, Kaul took great interest in Woolf’s response to the British Empire, particularly after reading Urmila Seshagiri’s article “Orienting Virginia Woolf: Race, Aesthetics, and Politics in To the Lighthouse.” In his paper, Kaul makes a vital contribution to this critical conversation:

"Virginia Woolf’s writings function as a criticism of the socially contingent nature of gender, sexuality, and class divisions, and, to date, scholarship has focused on Woolf’s writings as they relate to the evolution of Western attitudes towards said dichotomies over time. Woolf’s perspective on one important dichotomy, however—the subject-object dichotomy of coloniality—has remained significantly under-examined."

Attending the conference will be an invaluable opportunity for Kaul to discuss his research with top scholars in the field, and this experience will shape the rest of his time at Georgia Tech and perhaps the direction of his career.