University of Liverpool's Online Romance Course

 

Dr Sam Hirst (who runs Romancing the Gothic) will be teaching "Falling in love with love: A History of Popular Romance", a course comprising 10 weekly sessions online (via Zoom), on Wednesdays at 6 - 7.30pm UK time, starting from Wednesday 21 January. 

There will be "online learning materials for you to engage with before and after each live session" and the course fee is £155 (concessions £80).

This module will explore the evolution of romance writing from the 18th century to the current day, looking not only at the novel but at the intertwined relationship between the romance novel and cinema. [...]

This course is aimed at romance readers and anyone who wants to explore the best-selling genre and most influential genre in publishing. Each week there will be a set text but extracts will also be provided as we are aware that participants will need to prioritise their reading.

Syllabus

1. Amatory Fiction: 18th-Century Women Writing Desire
   
   • Text: Eliza Haywood, Fantomina (1724)
2. The Society Romance: Austen and her Legacy
   • Text: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
   • Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995, dir. Simon Langton)
3. The Rise of the Byronic Hero
   • Text: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
4. Orientalism and the Romance
   • Text: E. M. Hull, The Sheik (1919)
   • The Sheik (dir. Melford, US, 1921)
5. The Regency Romance
   • Text: Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (1951)
   • The Reluctant Widow (Knowles, UK, 1950)
6. Mills and Boon, Category Romance and the 'Nursies'
   
   • Betty Neels, Tabitha in Moonlight (1972)
7. Race and Romance
   • Beverley Jenkins, Indigo (1996)
8. The Romantic Comedy and Second Chance Romance
   • Texts: The Philadelphia Story (dir. George Cukor, US, 1940)
   • The Lovebirds (dir. Michael Showalter, US, 2020)
9. Queering the Romance
   • Text: Olivia Waite, Hen Fever (2020)
10. Romantasy, Mixed Genres, and the future(s) of Romance
    
    • Text: Tasha Suri, The Isle of the Silver Sea (2025)

Full details can be found on the University of Liverpool's website.

CFP: International Women's Writing Online Conference

I got an email letting me know about this and since it mentions romance, I thought I'd share the call for papers:

 

International Women’s Writing Online Conference

Thursday 15^th to Friday 16^th January 2026

Online

 

This online conference will be an interdisciplinary, cross-period, and global exploration of the role and impact of women’s writing, which is dedicated to the discussion of a broad range of women’s writing from any time, period, and place. We will discuss the popular and the literary; bestsellers and genres; poetry and prose; screen and script; writing for games and digital spaces; creative non-fiction; life-writing, biography, and memoir; and journalism and other forms of cultural production.

We will be thinking and talking about the pasts, presents, and futures of women’s writing on a global scale. We will explore women’s voices and artistic practices; the changing landscape of and about women’s writing; forms and mediums; the archival and the digital; textual and sexual politics; resistance and re-imaginings; interventions and intersections; and all of this across a wide range of disciplines, time periods, and texts.

We hope you will join us for this exciting event, which will bring together scholars, researchers, students, and enthusiasts to share their research, insights, and perspectives in an open and inclusive atmosphere. We welcome submissions for individual twenty-minute papers as well as for full panels and workshops. And we are keen to explore women’s writing from any time period, as well as in any genre or form. Subjects can include (but are not bound by):

·       The portrayal and evolution of women’s writing across different periods and genres

·       Archives and memorialisation

·       Pasts, presents, and futures

·       Women’s writing on page, stage, and screen

·       The poetics of women’s writing

·       Creative practices and performance

·       Writing place and space

·       Bestsellers and the popular

·       Women writing for the screen

·       Cultural, historical, and social contexts

·       Reframing history and envisioning futures

·       Traditional and digital forms of women’s writing

·       The global and the local

·       Autoethnography and authorship; memory and memorialisation

·       The figure of the author: celebrity, fans, and representations

·       Race, class, gender, and resistance                     

·       Activism and protest; freedoms and oppression

·       Writing technologies

·       Women’s writing and pleasure

·       Intersectionality and dualities

·       Women’s literary canon

·       The speculative and the imaginary

·       Women in and writing games

·       Crime Fiction, the Gothic, and Horror

·       Bonkbusters, Romance, and Erotica

·       The pre- and post-#MeToo landscape

·       Multicultural approaches and practices

·       Women’s writing and form

·       Women’s writing and the market

·       The economics and politics of women’s writing

 

 

Submissions:

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250–300 words, a brief biographical note (up to 100 words), and contact details. Panel proposals are very welcome.

Please submit your proposals in a Word document to the team at womenswritingassociation@gmail.com by 12^th December 2025 making it clear that this is for the online conference. We encourage submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including early career researchers, and postgraduate students. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies are welcome. 

Please note that this will be a small online conference and we will shortly have two CFPs out for in-person conferences, which will be held at Falmouth University in June 2026 and Pescara University, Italy in September 2026.

All participants will be given free membership of the International Women’s Writing Association for a year.

Call for doctoral proposals in the field of Romance and/or Erotica at Falmouth University

Thought I'd add an image from the Falmouth University website showing where Falmouth is i.e. towards the tip of Cornwall (i.e. the lower left-hand corner of the UK).

The study of Romance and Erotica in their broadest forms is now being given more prominence in the academic field, albeit through often disparate strands. This is surprising given their popularity. For example, Romantic Fiction has long been one of the most popular genres of writing, outselling most other forms. However, despite its wide readership, it faces questions about the lack of diverse representation, as well as frequent attention being drawn to, for example, racist tropes of the othered body in both Romance and Erotica. Debates about the blurred boundaries surrounding pornography and Erotica similarly rage, as questions of ethics and morality circle.  

How are narratives of Romance/Erotica mediated through history? How do other cultures and societies represent and interrogate Romance/Erotica? How are images, narratives, and notions of Romance/Erotica read and understood through time and place? How do we navigate questions of consent? Bodily boundaries? Morality? Race? How do they engage with issues such as class? Capitalism? Power/control? Sex and sexualities? How do they respond to and shape attitudes towards contemporary cultural concerns such as digital media; pornography; gender roles; sexual relationships; sex work; consent; ageing; mental health; sexual and physical health; the law; politics; and crime. How do they engage with celebrity culture, fashion, and place?  

We are seeking ground-breaking, innovative, and challenging practice-based and critical research proposals on Romance and/or Erotica in their widest sense, including, but not limited to, Bonkbusters and bestsellers, soap operas and mini-series, Gothic and Pulp Romances, melodrama and fantasy, popular magazines and literary Erotica, Hollywood and Bollywood, Romcoms and sitcoms, high and low culture, the sensational and the scandalous, digital depictions and heartwarming tales, the private and the public, Hallmark and Pornhub. 

Proposals on creative writing, literature, history, fashion, illustration, film, TV, popular culture, performance studies, games, and many other genres and mediums will be considered. 

More details here. 

A very long list of new (and some not so new) publications about romance

The open access journal TEXT dedicated a special issue to romance/romantic fiction, under the subtitle "Trope Actually – Popular Romance" but it wasn't just about romances in the 'central romantic relationship +HEA' sense: there were pieces of short fiction as well as an article on bonkbusters and another on historical fiction. You can find the whole issue here. 

Here, though, is a list of the articles in it which focus on romance:

Matthews, Amy, Justina Ashman, Millie Heffernan, Payton Hogan, Abby Guy, Harrison Stewart, Kathleen Stanley, Alex Cothren, and Elizabeth Duffield. 2025. “Editorial: Degrees of Love and Trope Actually.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–7.

O’Mahony, Lauren, and Yolandi Botha. 2025. “Reading the Romance in Australia: The Preferences and Practices of Romance Readers from ARRA Survey Data.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–22.

Matthews, Amy, Alex Cothron, and Rachel Hennessy. 2025. “Happily Ever after in the Age of Climate Crisis: The Argument for ‘Cli-Ro.’” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–18.

Mulvey, Alexandra, and Hsu-Ming Teo. 2025. “‘You’re a Total Dick Sometimes, but It’s a Tolerable Kind of Dickishness’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Sports Romances.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–20. 

Rouse, Lucy. 2025. “A Real Bad Boy: How Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us Exploits Romance Tropes.” TEXT 29 (Special 75): 1–17.

---

Moving on to other new (or at least new to the database) publications: 

Abdul Majid, Amrah (2025). “Faith, Love and Spiritual Growth in Norhafsah Hamid’s Will You Stay? and Will You Love Me?.” Akademika 95.2: 319-332.

 

Aprieska, Rizkana and Bayu Kristianto (2025). "Penerjemahan Portmanteau dari Bahasa Inggris ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia dalam Novel Seri The Ravenels 1–4." Linguistik Indonesia 43.2:263-280.

 

Cho, Hyerim, Denice Adkins, Alicia K. Long, and Diogenes Da Silva Santos. "Webtoon Romance Reading and New Ways to Look at Genre Reading." Library Trends 74, no. 1 (2025): 148-169. 

 

Clement, Ella. 2025. “What Women Actually Want: Professions, Prestige, and Desire in Bestselling Fiction.” SocArXiv. [This is a pre-print and I'm not sure of its final destination. It's not all about romance, but there is a significant section which is.]

García-Aguilar, Alberto (2023). "De la novela rosa a la comedia romántica: Mi marido es usted (1938), de Mercedes Ballesteros, y el guion de Volver a soñar (1942), de Claudio de la Torre y José López Rubio." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 33: 97–118. [I know this one isn't very new, but it describes (in Spanish) a plot with a secret baby, in a novel from 1938, and I thought that was worth noting. I've come across an early Mary Burchell with a secret baby too (another one where the protagonists were married at the point the baby was conceived). Anyway, thought that might be of interest if anyone, at some point, decides to look into the history of various types of romance plot.]

Horáčková, Martina (2025). Exploring Romantasy Tropes: Analysis of Ali Hazelwood’s Bride. Bachelor’s thesis, Silesian University in Opava.

Horpestad, Amalie Fogtmann (2025). Beyond Romance: Generic Innovation in Lucinda Riley’s The Seven Sisters Series. Masters thesis, The University of Bergen.

 

Karamat, Yashfa and Rukhma Nawaz and Zainab Firdos. (2025). "Negotiating Reality and Fantasy through Magical Realism in Suleikha Snyder’s Big Bad Wolf." Advance Social Science Archive Journal 4.1: 2860–2876. 

 

Keran, Molly (2025). "Generic Guarantees." Mid Theory Collective. [This was looking at Hoover's It Ends with Us (and contrasting it with Jennifer Crusie's Crazy for You).] 

Knowles, Thomas and Christopher Smith (2025). “Female Labour at Bletchley Park: reality and (romantic) fiction.” Intelligence and National Security. Online First. Open access.

Larson, Christine (2025). The labor of love: romance authors and platform solidarity. Journal of Communication. [Abstract available here.]

 

Martín Coloma, Ricardo, 2025. “On Activist Mothers and Gentrifying Lovers: From the Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement to the Model-Minority Myth in the Caribbean Romance Novel.” Journal of American Studies. [Abstract here, though as I mention in my entry for this in the RSDB, I think maybe only one of the two novels looked at has a happy ending for a romantic relationship.]

 

McAlister, Jodi and Kate Cuthbert (2025). "Romantasy: An overview and a history." Synergy 23.2. [Abstract] 

Niebling, Laura (2025). "Consent capital: From Romantasy’s “Alpha male archetypes” toward a new cultural theory in post-digital storytelling." New Media & Society. Online First. 

Pataki Šumiga, Jelena (2025). "The Sweet Bonds of Society: Food Symbolism in Bridgerton." [sic] - A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 15.2. 

Pelegrina Gutiérrez, Alicia. (2024). "Los modelos femeninos en Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre." Ogigia. Revista Electrónica De Estudios Hispánicos 35: 139–161.

Pelegrina, Alicia, 2024. “Franquismo y guerra civil en dos novelas rosas: Idilio bajo el terror (1938) y María Victoria (1940), de Josefina de la Torre”. Philologica Canariensia 30: 425-441.

Pradhan, Anil, 2025. "Return to Nature, Love: The Queer Potential of Rural Spaces and Travels in Contemporary Indian Gay Romance Fiction." Non-Western Approaches in Environmental Humanities. Ed. Gabriela Jarzębowska-Lipińska,  Aleksandra Ross and Krzysztof Skonieczny. Göttingen: V&R unipress. 183-199. [It is open access and should be available as a pdf from https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.14220/9783737018791 (the first page is blank, so keep scrolling!) and/or https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737018791.183 I haven't given it a separate entry in the database because it seems to be based on a chapter of the author's PhD thesis, and also many of the works discussed do not have happy endings, so are "romantic fiction" and not "romance". There are synopses in the thesis but not in this chapter.] 

Sare, Madelynn (2025). Assessing The Accessibility Of Queer Romance Book Covers As Digital Thumbnails: An Analysis Of Color Contrast, Colorblind Safety, And Typography Legibility. Master of Arts in Writing: Book Publishing, Portland State University.

 

van Peer, Willie and Anna Chesnokova (2025). "Love in Literature: Why Read About It?". International Handbook of Love: Transcultural and Transdisciplinary Perspectives (2nd edition).  Ed. Claude-Hélène Mayer and Elisabeth Vanderheiden. Springer, Cham.

Viklund, Julia (2025). Romantiska städer och spöken: Genreanvändning i samtida romance med magiska inslag. Bachelor’s thesis, Umeå University. 

Romance at the University of Dayton

Amy Krug, from the University of Dayton, is

happy to report that the University of Dayton (Dayton, Ohio) now has a dedicated collection, the University Libraries Popular Romance Collection. The fun part about this collection is that the books are almost entirely chosen by students. I teach popular romance, and as an experiential learning project a few years ago in those classes I had groups of students choose books (especially those that depict diverse characters) to go in the collection. Students in my classes are still selecting books every semester, with funding from our experiential learning department and our Libraries.

Here is UD's page on the collection:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ul_popularromance/

Secondly, I was recently on The Academic Minute podcast discussing reading 
romance as an act of resistance:
https://academicminute.org/amy-krug-university-of-dayton-reading-romance-as-an-act-of-resistance/ 

CFP: Book Series on Romance, Power and Desire

I'll transcribe the contents of this flyer below. I'm on the Board, as are some other romance scholars, so there's definitely an openness to proposals including/focussed on popular romance fiction, although obviously the series is very much not limited to that.

University of Wales Press

Romance, Power and Desire 

New Series from the University of Wales Press 

Romance, Power and Desire provides a focus for scholarly debates in the humanities around sexual/romantic power and agency, fantasy and social reality, relationships and sexual practices.

The series is global in scope and interdisciplinary in nature; it comprises of cutting-edge research in monographs and edited collections across a broad historical period, from the ancient world to the present day.

Series Editors: Dr Jo Parsons Falmouth University and Dr Meredith Miller Cardiff University

Would you like to write for this series? We’d love to hear from you. Please contact Chris Richards, Journals and Assistant Commissioning Editor, with your proposal, including a brief synopsis of the proposed work:  chris.richards@press.wales.ac.uk

To read more on the information we require at proposal stage, see our Publish With Us page https://www.uwp.co.uk/publish-with-us/ .

CFP: PCA Conference in Atlanta, April 2026

From their website:

The Romance Area of the National Popular Culture Association is soliciting abstracts for the next annual conference, to held April 8-11, 2026, in Atlanta, Georgia.

CFP: Reading the Romance Reader

Upload your 250-word proposal to pcaaca.org by November 30, 2025

What does it mean to be a romance reader (or viewer, or listener, or any other type of consumer)? Forty years ago, “creators” and “audience” were understood as binary opposites, reader response theory felt like a cutting-edge approach to genre fiction, and the idea of “participatory culture” wasn’t even a gleam in Henry Jenkins’ eye. Since that time, both Romancelandia and the scholarly tools for understanding and navigating it have blossomed. Romance readers have more opportunities to communicate their preferences to authors, publishers, and other readers, giving them more influence over the genre. Multiple modalities mean that romance enthusiasts can access new narratives more immediately, in more locations, in more formats, and, if they choose, with less visibility. At the same time, the romance genre is enjoying a moment of public pride, and romance readers are visible—to the public, to each other, online, in real life, to publishers and to bookstores—in an unprecedented way.

We believe that romance scholarship has also entered a golden age (thank you, JPRS!), with scholars from different disciplines and different countries bringing fresh ideas, exploring new or overlooked texts and modalities, and introducing field-specific analytical tools that offer a richer understanding of people’s engagement with popular romance. We therefore think it’s past time to turn our collective attention to the consumers of popular romance. For our 2026 conference, we invite you to reread the romance reader (or viewer, listener, LARPer, etc.). Showcase your favorite romance community, show off your data, teach us how to use your methods, offer a case study of public engagement with romance, theorize the affordances of reading vs listening vs viewing the romance, or take a deep dive into the historical changes in what it means to be part of the audience for popular romance.

---

There are more details, which you can find here.  Note that:

"If you would rather explore some other aspect of popular romance right now, you are very welcome to ignore our theme and submit a proposal on something else."

and

"Scholars, romance writers, romance readers/viewers, romance industry professionals, librarians, and any combination of these are welcome. You do not need to be an academic or have an institutional affiliation to be part of the Romance area." 

Looking for Participants: Romance and AI Survey

From Bridget Kies:

I am conducting a research study to understand the attitudes romance readers and writers have toward generative artificial intelligence use in the romance industry. 

I am recruiting individuals who are over the age of 18 and who identify as a romance reader or writer to take a brief survey online.

This survey will take approximately 15 minutes. Your participation in this study is voluntary. Your answers will be submitted anonymously. If you wish to participate in the study, you can use the anonymous link below.

If you have any questions about the research, please contact me at bkies@oakland.edu or 248-370-2261.

Please feel free to share the survey link with any other romance readers or writers who might be interested in participating.

https://oakland.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5zQN2obtFueDnTM 

CFP: Love and Resistance: Popular Romance Fiction and the Right, 2015-2025

The first election of Donald Trump sparked a series of "Rogue" romance anthologies that framed love as resistance, and the romance genre as progressive and inclusive. Looking back after a decade, how has the genre registered and responded to ongoing political contexts--in the United States and elsewhere--of political radicalization, xenophobia, natalism, revived eugenicist policies, the demonization of "gender ideology" and affirmative action, the redefinition and constriction of citizenship, transphobia, etc.?

Following conversations initiated at the IASPR 2025 Conference held in Mexico City, this edited collection seeks to address both the progressive and conservative aspects of the genre: its progressive and utopian side and also its embrace of conservative and reactionary trends, both in the texts themselves and in the publishing, distribution, and readership aspects of the romance genre world.

We welcome proposals that address these issues in North America, although we are especially keen to include submissions that challenge the cultural hegemony of the “Global North” from within and beyond its geographical borders.

- The political economy of publishing
- Censorship of (and in) popular romance
- Translational practices as political acts
- Counternarratives that challenge US master narratives (meritocracy, manifest destiny, American Dream, exceptionalism)
- Power and authoritarian masculinities and hegemonic femininities
- Neoliberalism and hetero/homo normativity
- Conspiracies and reactionaries
- Imagining the future in dark times
- Representations of politicians and government
- Biopolitics and corporeal politics
- Geopolitics, nationalism and patriotism
- Unequal couples: class, precarity and poverty
- Reader and author resistance (and compliance)
- Whiteness and racialisation
- Violence, social order and criminalization
- Defending BIPOC histories and archives
- Anticipatory obedience and civil disobedience

Please submit 250-word abstracts and a brief professional bio note to Nattie Golubov, ngolubov@unam.mx, Eric Selinger ESELINGE@depaul.edu and Charlotte Ireland, c.ireland@bham.ac.uk, by August 18, 2025.

The collection will be published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in collaboration with the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance.

New Publications: The Meaning of Life and Work; Sexuality; Race; Language; the Environment and More

I probably should have posted this list before it got so long, but more and more notifications kept arriving in my inbox and I kept thinking I'd post once I'd added all the news items to the RSDB and that took me longer than anticipated. Anyway, I'll begin with a couple of not-strictly academic pieces which are, nonetheless, quite academic:

In the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (June 8) Guy Lancaster (mentioned recently on this blog and who has a publication below) gives his backstory as a non-romance reader before exploring the societal implications of the denigration of romance:

For so long, we have regarded the consumption of Harlequin paperbacks as nigh pathological on the part of women, when in fact, it was the rejection of romance that typified the pathological condition beginning to emerge in American culture at large. After all, these stories center the phenomenon we call love. And as no less a thinker than G.W.F. Hegel, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 19th century, wrote in "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" (1820): "Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another, so that I am not isolated on my own, but gain my self-consciousness only through the renunciation of my independent existence and through knowing myself as the unity of myself with another and of the other with me." (https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2025/jun/08/the-thrill-of-love/, archived here and also here)

And that's not entirely unrelated to Jessica Taylor's ponderings about the value of her research into romance now that she's outside academia, and how success is measured (in publishing and academia): "What is writing a romance for? What is this essay for? Is work all there is?" Jessica's PhD thesis, Write the Book of Your Heart: Career, Passion and Publishing in the Romance Writing Community (2013) can be downloaded here.

AztecLady suggested that readers of Teach Me Tonight might be interested in reading this analysis by Gin Jenny of a sex scene in Cecilia Grant's A Gentleman Undone. 

And the latest additions to the Romance Scholarship Database:

Ahmed, Iman and Michael-Zane Brose, Lara Dengs, Lucie Elfering, Elena John, Mira Kalcker, Alice Kronenberg, Charmaine Küllenberg, Laura Le Donne, Alican Nazik, Lena Neisen, Öznur Zeynep Özdal, Hanna Schneemann, Antonia Steven, Julie Bøglund Strand (2025). A “Messy Complexity”? On Coming-Out, Identity Formation, and Community in Queer YA Romance Novels. Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.

Barta, Orsolya and Ann Steiner (2025). "Between Desire and Responsibility: Unplanned Pregnancies in Contemporary Romance Novels." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

Bausela Buccianti, Lucía (2025). “Demisexuality in Ali Hazelwood’s STEMinist Series: The Love Hypothesis (2021) and Love, Theoretically (2023).” REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 6(2), 52–69. [I've included a direct link to this open access article, instead of the DOI, because the DOI wasn't working yet when I started working on this post.]

 Burkes, Jordan (2025). The Love Hypothesis: Exploring the Consumption of Romance Novels. PhD, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College. [Embargoed until 2032 but the abstract can be found here.]

Chan, McKenzie (2025). Silly Little Romance Books: Analyzing the Value and Function of the Popular Romance Genre. Honours Dissertation, Seattle Pacific University.

 Cobb, Karie L. (2025). Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels. Master of Arts thesis, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

 Egidia, Clara & Ida Puspita. (2025). "Psycho-social Development of the Main Characters in the Novels Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers and Cantik itu Luka by Eka Kurniawan: A Comparative Study." INTERACTION: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa 12.1: 892–905. [But note that I was unable to locate some of the items in the list of works cited, as discussed here.]

Farooqui, Javaria (2025). "Broken Slippers and Glass Ceilings: Exploring the Romance of Reading Romance." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 14.

 

Hodson, Jane (2024). "The Significance of Stance in Fictional Representations of Non-Standard Language and Prescriptivism". New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, edited by Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra. Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters: 103-119. [https://doi.org/10.21832/9781800416154-007 I was late in finding this, probably because it doesn't mention romance in the title or the text of the essay. It does, though, focus on the use of "non-standard" language in Georgette Heyer's The Unknown Ajax. Currently, most/all of this is visible via Google Books.]

 

Kamblé, Jayashree (2025). "The Women Who Changed the American Mass-Market Romance Genre: BIPOC Editors, Authors, and Category Romance Novels from 1980 to 1988." Contemporary Women's Writing 19. [Abstract available here and excerpts here.]

 

Kilian, G. Charles (2025). Gender, Genre, and Pleasure: Eroticism and Its Limits in French and Francophone Literature (1950–2010). PhD, University of Wisconsin - Madison. [As noted in the RSDB, this may be of interest to romance scholars because of its attempts to define the differences between erotic literature, pornography and romance.]

Lancaster, Guy (2025). " ‘It had turned them all into voyeurs’: Celebrity as the Antithesis of Community in Molly O’Keefe’s Wild Child." Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 56.1:25–36. [Details here.]

 

Nygren, Sandra (2025). Perfect imperfections: – en intersektionell fat studies-analys av tjocka flickprotagonister i young adult-romance. Masters, Linnéuniversitetet.  

 

Penttinen, Sara (2025). Mind-Reading the Romance Novel: Effects of Single Perspective and Dual Perspective in Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners and Julie Olivia’s The Fiction Between Us. Master's in English Studies, University of Helsinki.

 

Raffloer, Gavin and Melanie Green (2025). "Of Love & Lasers: Perceptions of Narratives by AI Versus Human Authors." Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans. [This is Online First, so does not yet have pagination. Also note that the paper discusses romance generated by AI versus romance written by humans, and I've written some comments on the methodology from the perspective of a romance scholar.]

 

 Sutton, Denise H. (2025). “Romance Publishing for a New Generation: The Case of Harlequin and Mills & Boon In India.” Publishing History 89:7-27. [More details in the RSDB]

 Suwanban, Rapeeporn Pauline (2025). Popular Romance & Orientalist Fantasy 1721-1930. PhD, Birkbeck, University of London.

 

Valovirta, Elina (2025). "Romancing the Caribbean Sea: Size, Mobility and Sustainability in Cruise Ship Romance Fiction". Anglia 143.2: 382-397. https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2025-0026

 

Wilder, Mims (2025). (Wo)Men in Love: An Analysis of Sexual Scripts, Escapism, and Queer Explorations Among Woman Readers and Authors of Male/Male Romance Novels. Doctor of Philosophy in Human Sexuality, California Institute of Integral Studies.  [More details here.]

Call for Papers: Northeast Popular Culture Association virtual conference

NORTHEAST POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION, Virtual, October 9 to October 11, 2025
AREA: ROMANCE/POPULAR ROMANCE FICTION

Deadline: Tuesday, July 15th by 5pm EST

Contact email: Wendy Wagner wwagner@jwu.edu

The Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA) will host its 2025 annual conference this fall as a virtual conference from Thursday, October 9th, to Saturday, October 11th, 2025.

We are seeking paper proposals on the topic of Romance/Popular Romance Fiction for its annual conference.

We welcome a wide variety of papers related to romance and popular romance fiction. Possible approaches can include cultural studies, narrative analysis, issues of representation , production and dissemination of romance fiction, audience studies, the public uses of romance fiction/s, and more.

We are also interested in forming panels around some of the following topics:

· Romance and fanfiction – fandom as a training ground for developing romance writers

· The Romance industry and social media marketing

· Romance re-imagining itself – How does contemporary romance fiction take on and transform its own genre? How does it re-make the “pirate romance,” the “arranged marriage” trope, fairy tales and mythological re-tellings?

· Romance fiction in languages other than English

· Romance and disabilty

More information here.

New Publication: "Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction"

 

Still Reading Romance: Identity and Engagement with Popular Romance Fiction

Edited by Josefine Smith and Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman

This edited volume explores multiple issues in romance fiction, based on survey data from real romance readers. An updated version of Janice Radway’s influential survey looking at romance readers in the early 1980s, this time scholars explore romance readers’ habits and attitudes in the twenty-first century. Each contributor in this volume uses the same survey data to make unique statements about gender, intersectionality, popular fiction, and popular culture. By using a common data set but approaching it from different perspectives, this unique volume is able to apply multiple methodologies to the same subject.

This was due in April from Rowman & Littlefield but I didn't see any information about it on Google Books so I assumed it had been delayed. It probably wasn't, because although there's still not a lot of information out about it, it has indeed been published.

The full abstract can be found on the publisher's website (Rowman & Littlefield has been taken over by Bloomsbury, so although it was published by R&L, the details are on the Bloomsbury site here).

Luckily Jonathan Allan has now received a copy and was able to send me images of the contents pages, so I'll include the titles of the articles below:

----

Jacqueline Burgess and Gaja Kolodziej - "Re-Reading Romance: Exploring Practitioner, Reader, and Industry Perceptions of the Genre"

Ayşegül Rigato - "From Private to Public: #Bookstagram as a Safe Space for Romance Readers"

Josefine Smith - "Romance Readers' Perceptions of New Adult Fiction"

Natalie Duvall and Matt Duvall - "Which Women Want What?: The Shifting Demographics and Perspectives of Romance Readers"

Jessica Caravaggio - "Social Media, Critical Analysis, and Feminist Action: Popular YA's Role in Disseminating Theory Online"

Joann Stout - "Beyond the Bodice Ripper: Why Erotic Romance is Feminist Literature" 93-110

Lise Shapiro Sanders - "Reading Historical Romance/Reading Romance Historically"

Anna Michelson - "Romance Reading as a Social Activity"

Andrea Barra - "Escaping the Negativity of "Escapism": Rethinking Romance Reader Notions of Why They Read"

Jessica M. W. Kratzer - "Love, Romance, Sex, and Happily Ever After: A Feminist Exploration of Women who Read Romance Novels"

Kathleen W. Taylor Kollman - "Coming of Age and Coming Out: The Intersection of New Adult and Queer Romance"

Trinidad Linares - "Getting Love Out of the Margins: Race, Disability, Sexuality, and the Idea of a Happy After for Marginalized People"

Christina M. Babu - "Retellings and Re-readings - Romance, Representation, and Reimaginations in Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (2022)"

Louise Schulmann-Darsy - "Mr. Darcy as the Perfect Book Boyfriend, or the Impact of BookTok on Male Characters in Romance Books"

Sara Partin and Josefine Smith - "Reading Romance and Erotic Literacy"