ORLANDO and the Art of Becoming: A Conversation with Dr. Madelyn Detloff
Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Masterpiece through the lens of Trans-Visibility and Queer History
Friday, March 27, 2026
6:00 PM -7:00 PM
Blue Heron Books
1209 New York 213
High Falls, NY
“He was a woman.” With one of the most famous sentences in literary history, Virginia Woolf transformed the landscape of the English novel. Published in 1928, Orlando remains a groundbreaking exploration of identity, time, and the fluid nature of the soul.
Join us for an evening with renowned Woolf scholar Dr. Madelyn Detloff as we dive into the enduring relevance of this "fictional biography." We will discuss Orlando not just as a modernist experiment, but as a vital text for understanding trans-visibility and queer history today. From the aristocratic courts of the 16th century to the "present moment" of the 20th, we’ll explore how Woolf’s work continues to offer a roadmap for those navigating a world of binaries.
Whether you are a lifelong Woolf devotee or are picking up the book for the first time, this conversation will illuminate why Orlando is more than a novel—it is a political and personal manifesto for the ages.
Madelyn Detloff is Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies and Professor of English at Miami University, Ohio, USA, which takes its name from the Myaamia people, on whose traditional homelands the university is situated. Detloff studies and teaches how social descriptors such as race, age, gender, sexuality, nationality, and (dis)ability are formed and deformed by systems of power that categorize some groups of people as worthy of resources needed to live and flourish, while categorizing other groups as threats to the well-being of the privileged, purportedly “normal” community, nation, race, or gender. Detloff focuses mostly on intersectional feminist, queer, and crip theories as some (but not all) of the tools necessary to undo the logic of these systems of power in the name of bringing about a more just and accountable world. In addition to being editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Orlando, Detloff is author of The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the 20th Century (2009), The Value of Virginia Woolf (2016), and co editor of Queer Bloomsbury (2016) with Brenda Helt.
Currently Detloff is General Editor of the Oxford Intersections: Gender Justice project due to launch later this spring, and one of three editors for the University Press of Florida series Queer Feminist Modernities.