Although Virginia Woolf was a stranger to New York City, she imagined it with striking luminosity in her essay “America Which I Have Never Seen” (1938). Her narrative voice, “Imagination,” observes, “‘The City of New York, over which I am now hovering, looks as if it had been scraped and scrubbed only the night before. It has no houses. It is made of immensely high towers, each pierced with a million holes’” (57). She goes on, “‘Down below in the streets long ribbons of traffic move steadily, on and on and on. Bells chime. Lights flash. Everything is a thousand times quicker yet more orderly than in England. My mind feels speeded up…. A new language is coming to birth—’” (57). In this short essay, New York City is mythologized as a site without a past, where marks made and traces left behind by those living within it are erased immediately, and where skyscrapers conquer space in new ways. Woolf contrasts the New York cityscape's abundance of sound, speed, and light with quiet evenings reading by a fire, lengthy, formal dinner parties, and the dark “cosy corners” and “inglenooks” of English sitting rooms (57–8). New York, then, becomes gleaming, ageless, and slippery to Woolf's Imagination, uncluttered by history, nationalism, politics, or “great men's houses.” New York provides a completely new kind of space.

It is this fresh, clean, chrome-like, and illuminated cityscape she posits that initially inspired the vision for the Nineteenth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, held at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus in New York City, June 4–7, 2009. In addition to encouraging new scholarly work in Woolf studies, the conference celebrated fresh perspectives on movement, sound, and light and elicited new ways of exploring Woolf's influence on a diverse group of artists and critics. By extending invitations to creative writers, visual artists, musicians, dancers, and “common readers” to join scholars from around the globe, the conference's ethos embraced that of its host city, which pulls together diverse populations with disparate backgrounds, histories, and ideals.