Peter Mallios
Research Expertise
African American/African Diaspora
American
Modernist
Post-1900 British and Irish
Transatlantic Studies
Women's Literature and Feminist Theory
Peter Mallios is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, with a background in law. He is the Executive Director of the University of Maryland Honors College, and also teaches and tutors in the Goucher Prison Education Partnership. He specializes in modern American literature and the modern novel. His interests include 19th, 20th, and 21st century multiethnic U.S. literature and political history; democratic theory, constitutional law, and law and literature; modernisms and the novel; prison literature and reparations; digital analytics; and the significance and reception of internationally authored literatures in the U.S. His first book Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (Stanford UP 2010; Adam Gillon Prize 2012) concerns Joseph Conrad’s literary, cultural, and political reception in the US in the earlier twentieth century, and its implications for American modernism and writers including Theodore Dreiser, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and T.S. Eliot. He is the author of "Tragic Constitution: U.S. Democracy and its Discontents," and is currently completing the book project, Weak President: Woodrow Wilson and the Resistance of Modern Multiethnic U.S. and Global Literature, which explores modern U.S. and world literatures in relation to conflicts of race, gender, democracy, and constitutional and international law issuing from the Wilson administration.
Mallios is co-editor (with Carola M. Kaplan and Andrea White) of Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives (Routledge 2005), and editor of the Modern Library editions of Conrad’s The Secret Agent (2004) and Victory (2003). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Studia Neophilologica, Modernism/Modernity, Kresy, Europa, The International Review of Modernism, The Faulkner Journal, The Conradian, Conradiana, The Stanford Humanities Review, and the New Cambridge Companion to Conrad. He is founding director of the digital Foreign Literatures in America project, an archival project concerning the reception and significance of non-American authored literary texts in the U.S., and predicated on an understanding of US “American literature” as including global textuality that has been significant in the US.
Awards & Grants
Provost’s Do Good Innovator Award
In partnership with the Office of the Provost, the Innovator Awards highlight the incredible members of our campus community who create, nurture, expand and amplify social impact throughout education, programs and research.
Peter Mallios created and co-taught the course “ENGL388B, Mass Incarceration and Prison Education: Academic Writing in Prison.” Taking years to develop the course and to build on his experience working with the Goucher Prison Education Partnership, he collaborated with four co-teachers, community partners and our undergraduate students to study mass incarceration and develop a pedagogy for teaching people who are incarcerated.
Hathi Trust Research Center Grant
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) enables computational analysis of the HathiTrust corpus.
Adam Gillon Book Prize
From Joseph Conrad Society of America for best book on Conrad 2009-2011.
Digital
Foreign Literatures in America Project
Digital archive concerning reception of Russian, British, Irish and other non-U.S.-authored literatures in the U.S.
Publications
Weak President: Woodrow Wilson and the Resistance of Modern Multiethnic U.S. and Global Literature
Explore modern U.S. and world literatures in relation to conflicts of race, gender, democracy, and constitutional and international law issuing from the Wilson administration.
Book coming soon.
"Invisible Bullets: A Return to the 1910's in American Literary Studies."
The 1910s occupy a strange place in the US literary critical imagination, simultaneously overly familiar and startlingly unknown.
Read More about "Invisible Bullets: A Return to the 1910's in American Literary Studies."
Tragic Constitution: United States Democracy and Its Discontents.”
Tragedy is a recurrent subject in recent constitutional law scholarship.
Read More about Tragic Constitution: United States Democracy and Its Discontents.”
Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity
Our Conrad is about the American reception of Joseph Conrad and its crucial role in the formation of American modernism.
On Foreign Grounds: Toward an Alternative US Literary History, Archive, Methodology
This essay argues for the importance of the question, “What is US ‘American literature?”’ and for a sharp break with predominant modes of answering it.
Read More about On Foreign Grounds: Toward an Alternative US Literary History, Archive, Methodology
Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives
Best known as the author of Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is one of the most widely taught writers in the English language.
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The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad
This intense 1907 thriller -- a precursor to works by Graham Greene and John le Carre -- concerns a British double agent who infiltrates a cabal of anarchists.
This intense 1907 thriller -- a precursor to works by Graham Greene and John le Carre -- concerns a British double agent who infiltrates a cabal of anarchists. Conrad explores political and criminal intrigue in a modern society, building to a climax that the critic F.R. Leavis deemed "one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction."
Victory, by Joseph Conrad
Set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, Victory tells the story of a disillusioned Swede, Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young English musician, from the clutches of a brutish German hotel owner.
Set in the islands of the Malay Archipelago, Victory tells the story of a disillusioned Swede, Axel Heyst, who rescues Lena, a young English musician, from the clutches of a brutish German hotel owner. Seeking refuge at Heyst's remote island retreat on Samburan, the couple is soon besieged by three villains dispatched by the enraged hotelier. The arrival on the island of this trio of fiends sets off a terrifying series of events that ultimately ends in catastrophe. Edited, with notes and introduction, by Peter Mallios.
Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's first novel is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism.
Joseph Conrad's first novel is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes the introduction.
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Under Western Eyes
Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements, this isthe story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of
pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia. A gripping novel that
ultimately questions our capacity
Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements, this is
the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of
pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia.
A gripping novel that
ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of
human integrity. Edited by Peter Mallios, this new edition includes commentary and a reading
group guide.
Service & Outreach
Visiting Professor and Tutor
Goucher Prison Education Partnership
Peter Mallios is serving as Visiting Professor and Tutor for the Goucher Prison Education Partnership.
The Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP), a division of Goucher College, provides men and women incarcerated in Maryland with the opportunity to pursue an excellent college education. In courses at the two prisons, students are held to the rigorous academic standards for which Goucher is known. Courses are taught on site by Goucher College faculty as well as by outstanding professors from nearby colleges and universities.
Editorial Advisory Committee
Reports on articles submitted for publication in PMLA
Founded in 1883, the Modern Language Association of America provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy.
Advisory Editorial Board
Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such.
It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Australia, Canada, China, England, Denmark, France, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Spain, and Turkey.
Foreign Literatures in America Project (FLA)
Digital archive concerning reception of Russian, British, Irish and other non-U.S.-authored literatures in the U.S.
(Prototype of website now accessible; full site still under construction)
Read More about Foreign Literatures in America Project (FLA)