The Centre for Joseph Conrad Studies

The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK)

The Conradian is acknowledged as the journal of record in the field of Conrad studies and one of the major journals of English literary Modernism.

This scholarly journal dedicated to the life and work of Conrad is published twice annually by Rodopi of Amsterdam. During the past decade the journal has won accolades for its consistently well-edited contents and for its handsome appearance.

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad

In 2008, the Syndics of Cambridge University Press appointed as General Editors of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad J H Stape and Allan H Simmons. With these appointments, responsibility for The Cambridge Edition passed from the Institute for Bibliography and Editing at Kent State University, Ohio, to the Centre for Joseph Conrad Studies at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London.

Stape and Simmons were tasked with revivifying an edition that, begun four decades ago, had yielded just five volumes. Since their appointment, three new volumes have already gone to press, with a further four scheduled for delivery in 2010, and two to three volumes produced annually thereafter.

Joseph Conrad's fiction is a staple of Modern Literature courses in universities around the world, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Sustaining this, an international community of Conrad scholars is served by Societies, journals and annual conferences dedicated to the life and works of this author. Yet there has been no corrected collected edition of Conrad's work to support this activity since that produced, often in unedited or poorly edited form, in the 1920s.

The objective of The Cambridge Edition is to produce the first complete and textually correct edition of Conrad’s writings that will serve this and future generations of scholars, and maintain the standards associated with Cambridge University Press.

Each volume will involve establishing a corrected text from the surviving original source materials. Thus, manuscripts, typescripts, proofs and, where it can be shown that Conrad had a hand in corrections, serial versions and first and second editions will be examined in order to generate texts that are denuded of house-styling and editorial and compositorial additions unsanctioned by the author.

Preparation of the edition will entail scholarship of the highest order. To meet this requirement, an international team of established scholars has been recruited and, so as to foster and sustain healthy scholarship, this will be supplemented by post-graduates whose textual work has already marked them out as textual scholars of the future.

St Mary’s Colloquia on Conrad Textual Studies

The Centre for Conrad Studies at St Mary's hosts colloquia devoted to textual issues in the works of Conrad.

Inaugurated in October 2010, these colloquia boast international textual scholars actively contributing to the field who are invited to deliver papers on various topics related to the editing of Conrad's work. Papers from these colloquia are being gathered into a volume to be published by Radopi of Amsterdam.

Programme Archive

2011 Colloquium Programme (PDF File)
2010 Colloquium Programme (PDF File)