ATLANTA, Ga. (February 15, 2025) – The South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) has named Dr. John Peters, University of North Texas English professor, the 2025 Honorary Member, our highest distinction for lifetime scholarship and service. Peters, a leading scholar of Joseph Conrad and British modernism, has shaped the field with award-winning publications and leadership roles that reflect SAMLA’s mission to support scholars and students across all institutions.  

Finding a Scholarly Home in Moral Complexity: An Interview with Dr. John Peters 

For Dr. John Peters, the fiction of Joseph Conrad offers vocabulary for moral complexity as it applies to past, present, and future readers.  

“Modern readers face those same kinds of conflicts,” Peters notes, “where they have to choose not between a good and a bad but instead between two goods or two bads.”  

Peters, a professor at the University of North Texas, points to Lord Jim, a 1900 novel by Conrad, as an example. The main character, Jim, is torn between loyalty to a moral code and responsibility to the people in his life, particularly his common-law wife, Jewel. 

“I think I’ve always been interested in the psychological and moral dilemmas that his characters encounter,” Peters said. “That’s always been something I thought was important and compelling.”  

Such dilemmas have animated Peters’ scholarship, teaching, writing, and service for decades, catapulting him into becoming one of the world’s preeminent experts on Joseph Conrad, and in 2025, earning him SAMLA’s highest distinction: the Honorary Member Award. 

Writing in a Vacuum—and Being Heard 

As Dr. John Peters readily admits, his career did not unfold according to a carefully mapped plan. Instead, it developed through a series of unexpected turns. 

Peters’ first book, Conrad and Impressionism, is a work that went on to have a lasting influence in Conrad studies. At the time he was writing it, however, Peters was unsure whether his argument would land at all. 

“I felt like I was writing in a vacuum,” he recalls. He sensed that something was off in how “literary impressionism” was being used—applied so broadly that it risked meaning very little. 

Peters set out to define the term more carefully, positioning literary impressionism as a middle ground between nineteenth-century realism and the stream-of-consciousness techniques that would follow in the early twentieth century. By narrowing the category and grounding it in close textual analysis, he offered a framework that proved both durable and useful. 

The book was well received, selected for Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list, and remains widely cited more than two decades later. Peters finds the longevity of his scholarship especially gratifying, not as a matter of prestige, but as evidence that careful, patient research can have a lasting life. 

Leadership as Service to the Field 

Beyond his publications, Peters has contributed to the profession through sustained service and leadership. During his term as president of the Joseph Conrad Society, he helped establish major awards, including a book prize and a lifetime achievement award. 

It’s fitting, then, that Peters now achieve the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award himself. He says receiving SAMLA’s Honorary Member Award is both humbling and gratifying.  

“I looked at some of the people who had received it before and they were highly accomplished scholars,” he said. “To be in their company is quite an honor.”  

Peters has maintained a long-standing relationship with the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He first encountered SAMLA in the mid-1990s, when he interviewed for academic positions at the annual conference. Even then, he recalls being struck by the organization’s size, energy, and intellectual seriousness. 

“And probably, in some ways, it’s going to get larger,” he remarked.  

Peters’ hopes for the future are well-placed. In 2025, SAMLA hosted its largest annual conference since the coronavirus pandemic, welcoming nearly 800 scholars from 37 U.S. states and 12 countries. Over the years, Peters has repeatedly returned to SAMLA as a presenter, reader, and longtime member. Today, he describes it as his home regional MLA, particularly as other organizations face an uncertain future. 

Why SAMLA’s Mission Matters 

Dr. Peters is especially attuned to what distinguishes SAMLA from other professional organizations. In his view, one of SAMLA’s greatest strengths is its commitment to inclusivity across institutional contexts. While national conferences often cater to research-intensive universities, SAMLA actively welcomes faculty from community colleges, comprehensive universities, graduate students, independent scholars, and undergraduates in addition to research-track faculty at flagship universities. 

He recalls teaching earlier in his career at a comprehensive university, where heavy teaching loads and grading demands left little time for research.  

“I think that SAMLA being able to provide resources and opportunities for those who have heavy teaching loads is a really important and valuable function,” Peters stated. 

For scholars in those positions, organizations like SAMLA provide essential resources: opportunities to present work, remain intellectually engaged, and feel part of a broader scholarly community. 

Beyond Conrad 

Outside of his academic work, Peters keeps tropical fish and has pursued literary translation as a serious avocation. His interest in translating Japanese poetry began with a college assignment and eventually led to publications in respected literary journals and a full-length translation of Takamura Kotaro’s Cheiko Poems. 

“It was again kind of an accident. I get this assignment in class to translate this poem and so I just translate and when I hear the other translations I think, this one’s a better translation. And so later on when I encountered that other poet, I thought, well, maybe I can, you know, maybe I can do this.” 

Though he describes this work as a hobby, it echoes the same qualities that define his scholarship: patience, attentiveness to language, and respect for complexity. Like much of his career, it emerged organically and became meaningful through sustained care. 

A Career Worth Celebrating 

As Peters reflects on his career, he returns to the idea that professional lives rarely unfold exactly as planned. He offered some advice in closing. 

“Sometimes our careers go in a particular way, not necessarily how we originally planned them,” he said. “I’m not sorry that I’ve spent so much time on Conrad. There’s a value in feeling as if you have a solid command of the critical conversation surrounding a particular topic, which is hard to do.”  

In honoring John Peters, SAMLA recognizes not only a distinguished scholar of Joseph Conrad, but a career shaped by moral seriousness, generosity, and the kind of “happy accidents” where moral choices can become just two “goods” in disguise.