News
Joseph Conrad's Polish-Ukrainian "Graveyard": A New Digital Collection and Exhibit at Duke University Libraries, Durham, North Carolina, 15 October 2024 - 5 April 2025. Exhibit Link.
From the website: “This exhibit commemorates both the centenary of Joseph Conrad's death (1924) and the tenth anniversary of the start of Russia's war against Ukraine (2014), the place of his birth. The cornerstone of the exhibit is one of the few personal items that the orphaned survivor of Russian imperialism brought with him when he went into permanent exile abroad.”
CFP: MLA PANEL: Joseph Conrad: False Truth & the Absurd (see Upcoming Conferences for more details)
Panel on Conrad’s critique of false or misleading “truths” in a world without set meanings. Papers considered on national/imperial truisms, or the “absurd” as a mode of actuality or critique. Short bio, 250wd proposals.
Deadline for submissions: Sunday, 16 March 2025
Mark Deggan, Simon Fraser University: mark_deggan@sfu.ca
CFP: The 52nd Annual International Conference of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) 2 to 4 July 2025 Rome, Italy
The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) invites proposals for 25-minute papers and for panels on all topics related to Conrad’s life, work and circle are welcome.
The deadline for submission of abstracts (approx. 250 words) is Sunday 2 March 2025.
More information here
Winner of the 2024 Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Award: Jim Ward ”Conrad and Australia: Operatic Instability and ‘The Planter of Malata.’”
Winners of the 2024 Adam Gillon Award:
1st place: David J. Supino, Joseph Conrad a Bibliographical Catalogues. Liverpool University Press 2022.
2nd place (shared): Robert Hampson and Veronique Pauly. The Reception of Joseph Conrad in Europe, Bloomsbury, 2022, and J.A. Warodell, Conrad’s Decentered Fiction. CUP 2022
3rd place: Alexia Hannis, The Discerning Narrator: Conrad, Aristotle, and Modernity. University of Toronto Press, 2023.
Honorable mention: Kim Salmons, and Tania Zulli, eds. Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad. Bloomsbury 2021.
Winner of the 2022 Zdzislaw Najder Essay Award: Ruchi Mundeja, “Worlding Appetite: Colonialism, Modernism, and the Gustatory in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” English Studies, vol. 102, no. 8, 2021.
CFP International Conference, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland 10th-12th October 2024
The Joseph Conrad Society (Poland) and The Jagiellonian University Joseph Conrad Research Centre invite proposals for papers for the International Conference, to be held at the Jagiellonian University from 10th to 12th October 2024. See further details at Upcoming Conferences.
Zdzislaw Najder Essay Award
The Joseph Conrad Society of America announces the creation of the Zdzislaw Najder Essay Award. See details at Awards.
The Young Scholar Travel Grant Award has been Renamed the Torrens Travel Grant
Named for the Torrens, which was Conrad’s last ship before he embarked on his writing career, travel grants for young scholars are offered by the Joseph Conrad Society of America to offset the cost of attending a conference to present a paper on Conrad. Applicants should submit the following: a letter itemizing travel expenses for the entire trip and indicating financial need (preference will be given to graduate students and adjunct faculty members) and evidence of having a paper on Conrad accepted for presentation at an upcoming conference (a photocopy of either a letter of acceptance or of the appropriate page in a conference program). Applications should be sent to Joyce Wexler, President, The Joseph Conrad Society of America, jwexler@luc.edu . Applicants are encouraged to apply as early as possible, since funds are limited and will be awarded on by a committee of JCSA officers on a first-come, first-served basis.
Award-winning short film about Conrad
Joseph Conrad Dreams and Life was the first-place prize winner of the Polonia Film Festival in 2017. The film was made by Andrzej Siedlecki, emeritus lecturer, Macquarie Uni, Sydney. He sent this message to members of the JCSA: “This is for pro publico bono: Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wDqaZot6K8
PS: If you are happy to use it, please let me know. Zobacz/Look at: www.andrzejsiedlecki.pl
Joseph Conrad Society of America: Anti-Racism Statement
(6/17/2020)
The Executive Council and other members of the Joseph Conrad Society of America write in this important moment to voice our commitment to racial justice. The recent killings of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and countless others underscore the fatal nature of racism in the United States and the need for fundamental change. The Joseph Conrad Society of America stands in solidarity with those working to dismantle racial inequality, brutality, and injustice. We condemn all acts of violence against the Black community from micro-aggressions to physical violence to systemic, structural racism. We bear witness to the extraordinary vulnerability of Black and Brown lives in America, and the persistence of white priority across social and legal institutions that maintain this condition. We unequivocally state that Black Lives Matter, and we express profound sorrow for the families, friends, and communities who have lost irreplaceable lives to racist violence.
We know that no statement of this kind is sufficient, and we are committed to pursuing in coming months concrete ways in which work involving Conrad and our Society can contribute to and work towards racial justice. We will cultivate greater inclusivity in our membership, conferences, and speaking panels, and will continue our promotion of the global diversity of Conrad scholarship that is a central element of Conrad studies worldwide.
Conrad was an immigrant, brought up in a colonized country. His first two novels gave voice to the peoples of Indonesia in the face of British, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonialism, while one of his most well-known works, Heart of Darkness, revealed what was happening in the Congo in 1899, before E.D. Morel set up his Congo Reform Association to expose and challenge King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo and its peoples.
Heart of Darkness has also been challenged by a well-established line of criticism for its own racism, and Conrad’s relation to racism is often complex and contradictory. Many Black and other writers of color in the U.S. and worldwide have since written with intense interest in Conrad: sometimes critically; sometimes in ways that also find great literary, political, and philosophical foundation and inspiration in Conrad; and always thoughtfully, purposively, and from very different points of view considering Conrad, to ends including the challenging of racism, imperialism, and authoritarianism in all forms.*
As part of a global community of Conrad scholars, we are committed to the inclusion of Black and other global voices engaged with Conrad’s works and to the illumination and challenging of racism and imperialism as they are present and also resisted in Conrad’s works. We believe the study of Conrad must be inclusive if it is to have value: the study of Conrad is important in part because of the huge horizons of global context and important questions his works introduce for consideration and dialogue. We value the study of Conrad too for the aspirations of cross-cultural and global solidarity to which his work often gives voice.** Nothing is more anathema to the values of our Society than the discounting of Black lives, or injustice or violence in any form to Black people.
* Such writers include Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Paule Marshall, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Max Dorsinville, Caryl Phillips, Zakes Mda, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and foundational postcolonial thinker Edward Said.
** There is a bond between us and that humanity so far away. I am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind a dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea. “ Author’s Note” to Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895).
Peter Mallios, President, JCSA University of Maryland Joyce Wexler, First Vice-President, JCSA Loyola University Chicago Yael Levin, Second Vice-President, JCSA Hebrew University Ellen Burton Harrington, Secretary, JCSA University of South Alabama David Mulry, Web Master, JCSA College of Coastal Georgia Kim Salmons, Book Review Editor, JCTSt. Mary’s University, Twickenham Chris GoGwilt, Past President, JCSA Fordham University Debra Romanick Baldwin, Past President, JCSA, and Trustee University of Dallas Brian Richardson, Past President, JCSA University of Maryland John Peters, Past President, JCSA University of North Texas Andrea White, Past President, JCSA California State University, Dominguez Hills Carola Kaplan, Past President, JCSA California State University, Pomona Paul Armstrong, Past President, JCSA Brown University Richard Ruppel, Past President, JCSA Chapman University Hunt Hawkins, Past President, JCSAUniversity of South Florida Robert Caserio, Trustee, JCSA Pennsylvania State University Julie Beth Napolin, Trustee, JCSA Eugene Lang College, New School University Katherine Isobel BaxterUniversity of Northumbria Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London
