The D H Lawrence Society of North America and the Joseph Conrad Society of America are seeking panel papers on the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of both Lawrence and Conrad.  Proposals specialized on either author will be considered for inclusion, but we are especially interested in papers that address both of these important writers in a comparative or interdisciplinary manner.  In either case, early for Conrad and later for Lawrence, the author left his home country in the interests of a less constrained existence elsewhere, thereby raising the possibilities of exilic nostalgia and regret.  At the same time, both equally sought spaces of freedom and movement in expatriate settings.  In this latter sense, the notion of emancipation was central to the lives of both authors and a continual theme of their fictional and non-fictional texts, not least where such freedoms might be held in tension with the spectre of exile.  Moreover, in their writings, transplantations, issues of otherness, and/or the transnational played a significant role. Comparative proposals are welcome, for instance, on their travels and travel writing, staging of fictions in non-Western settings, and literary depictions of other peoples. For both writers,after all, issues of marginalization, colonization, and “freedom” from a home culture continued to anchor the fiction, just as in our own epoch such themes continue to roil both academic and imaginative work. 

Please send proposals of 200-300 words by March 15, 2026, to both Mark Deggan (mark_deggan@sfu.ca) and Benjamin Hagen (benjamin.hagen@usd.edu).