OK, folks, it's time to get serious about this "academic study of romance fiction" business.
The deadline for submissions to the Fifth International Conference on Arts and Humanities in Honolulu, Hawai'i has just been extended to September 13, and from their website, it looks like they're open to all sorts of offers: from completed papers to abstracts, student papers, "Work-in-Progress Reports or Proposals for Future Research," and "reports on issues related to teaching."
It's a tough job, folks, but someone's got to do it. Who's ready to join me in proposing a panel or session or SOMETHING on romance fiction? Let's do something international, some sort of Aussie / American / South Asian discussion, with anyone from the UK who can rustle up the funds. Or something about new trends in the scholarship, or about the challenge of teaching this fiction, or some mixture of all of them.
I know there will be a good contingent at the Popular Culture Association convention in Boston, in April, in response to our open-to-offers call for papers, but that's April in Boston, and we're talking January in Hawai'i here. I lived in Hawai'i as a boy; then I moved to Detroit. Trust me: Hawai'i is better.
So who's in? Let me know by email, or via the listserv, or here at the blog. We're pressed for time, but we can get this, if we really want. (Oops! Wrong island, but you get the idea.)
We now return to our regular blogging schedule.
--E
I hope you can get something going. I live in Hawaii now, where I study at UH, so I'd love to be able to attend an informative session on romance without having to spend the travel funds. I keep trying to work up something coming from my linguistics perspective, but the days seem to keep being 24 hours instead of conveniently expanding for me.
ReplyDeleteGood luck.
You know, Paca, they seem open to many things, including "Incomplete research or ideas for future research." I bet we could come up with something. Or, in any case, we would be able to talk about ideas at the conference itself!
ReplyDeleteI checked out the registration, and I will confess now that on my grad student budget, I'm probably only going to fork over the $350 or so if I am presenting or doing a poster or something that goes on the CV. There's a conference on music and language in Cambridge, UK that is exactly in my field next year, so I have to save money up for that. Surely, there is a student registration rate that I couldn't find for the Hawaii conference? Actually, and I am serious, I bet I could find a local organizer and volunteer for an afternoon to get me in. That'll be the workaround.
ReplyDeleteAs for presenting, I wrote it down in my notebook of projects to try to get to. My linguistics work is on hierarchical structures of extended speech. I have been wondering if I could find similar cues in written fiction to show how, for instance, Cruisie develops escalating tension in the first chapter of Bet Me by building certain structures in the text. Or I might just try presenting my speech work and then I could, on the side, meet with all of you. Please let me know if you get anything organized, and I will yell if I decide I have anything worth saying about Cruisie's writing.
Thanks for the interest, Pacatrue and Jen! Not many nibbles--those fees are awfully high, as I realized when my own giddiness had faded. Maybe we'll need to give this one a pass, and make our big plans for some other venue. *SIGH* We'll always have...Boston?
ReplyDeleteE